Aligulac.com changelog and feedback thread

Aligulac.com is an ongoing statistical project and website in development started in December 2012. It offers a comprehensive database of games from the pro and semipro SC2 scenes, as well as a unique rating system aimed at rating players and teams, and predicting games.

The FAQ might be able to answer your questions. If not, I'll be keeping an eye on this thread so you can ask away here. This thread is also for suggestions and feedback.

Single elimination brackets now support BYEs. This can be used to simulate more exotic types of brackets.

The rating charts now indicate the time of the major balance patches. They are: supply depot before barracks (1.1.2), removal of Khaydarin Amulet (1.3.0), Infestor nerf (1.4.0), Queen range buff (1.4.3) and of course the HotS release.

Matchup statistics now shown for every rating list.

We now have a rank of player earnings. Prize pools are tied to events, so you can see the history of a player, as well. Most of the major prizes should be entered, but the weekly cups are still missing.

Changed rating system to allow players who play rarely to adjust quicker, and player who play more often to adjust slower. Overall uncertainties increased to compensate for the overall decreased speed of adjustments.

Match listings now have icons indicating whether a match was played on- or offline, and whether it was WoL or HotS.

More information on player, team and event pages. Events now have matchup statistics, homepages and Liquipedia links. Players have earnings and a ratio of offline matches to their total. One interseting thing is the MC number, inspired by the Erdos and Bacon numbers. To get an MC number of one, you have to play an offline match against MC. To get an MC number of two you have to play an offline match against someone with an MC number of one, and so on. MC was chosen because he is the player with the most offline games.

There is a new balance reports page. This will be expanded as we think of more statistics to produce.

Player match histories are now also filterable by game version and type (offline/online). Lifetime head-to-head records are best checked using the results search tool.

Ditched the server-rendered charts for an interactive javascript library.

Rating adjustment pages now show more information about the rating calculation.

Player search has been heavily improved and applies to the top-right search box, as well as the search functions for predictions and match search. These functions will now search by player tags, team names, player and team aliases, country codes with two or three letters, as well as the commong English names for countries (in cases where these are one word), races (P, T, Z, R=Random and S=Switcher). It's still possible to use player ID lookup if necessary.

Rating lists are filterable by race and nationality.

Menus reorganized.

Created a database statistics page, where you can also download a SQL dump of the whole database (sans ratings and sensitive information).

Rating deviations are now displayed on the player pages.

Improved the player rating chart, showing changes in rating deviation over time.

2013-04-20: Links to Aligulac player profiles on Liquipedia.2013-03-07: Fewer than 10,000 uncatalogued matches. More than 120,000 games in the database.2013-03-05: Opening of the official Aligulac twitter @Sc2Aligulac.2013-02-22: Started using the GitHub issue tracker.2013-02-14: Interview on ESFIWorld.2013-01-31: Added a huge number of missing results (thanks, TLPD).2013-01-21: Source code available on GitHub.2013-01-23: Two thirds of the database catalogued.2012-12-26: Added a large number of missing teamleague games.2012-12-11: Site available to the public for the first time (thanks, SC2Charts).

I decided to make a fixed thread for the feature updates and feedback instead of making a new one every two weeks.

If there's still interest, I will keep making the rating updates, but all the other news will go here instead.

Changes from the last two weeks:

Single elimination brackets now support BYEs. This can be used to simulate more exotic types of brackets.

The rating charts now indicate the time of the major balance patches. They are: supply depot before barracks (1.1.2), removal of Khaydarin Amulet (1.3.0), Infestor nerf (1.4.0), Queen range buff (1.4.3) and of course the HotS release.

Matchup statistics now shown for every rating list.

We now have a rank of player earnings. Prize pools are tied to events, so you can see the history of a player, as well. Most of the major prizes should be entered, but the weekly cups are still missing. Thanks to Conti for this feature!

I want to encourage people to snoop around the site and report bugs, missing matches, wrong results and just general feedback. I try to interact with people and answer questions on the twitter account, but 140 characters isn't much when you want to answer question regarding statistics.

On April 09 2013 05:34 delHospital wrote:While searching for Polish players (on a side note, is there a better way than searching for "pl"?) I've noticed that there's Zylcu and a misspelled version of him: Zyclu.

With the recent WCS changes, we are working on implementing the GSL/OSL as part of the WCS hierarchy and we are currently discussing whether or not to change the names to something like this:WCS -> (year) -> (season) -> (region) -> (premier/challenger or Code S/A) -> (qualifiers/main tournament)

Instead of keeping our old GSL 2013 Season X hierarchy. However we are not sure which name to give to GSL since most people still associate WCS KR with GSL Code S/A.

I know right?We should base ranking on popular opinion (1$ per rating point)

Some fighting-game communities actually do that for qualitative character tier lists (minus the $1), they get community (or trusted players) to discuss and vote and they take the averages. Obviously it doesn't work for SC2 players because they change in 'skill' constantly and there is thousands of them, but just saying =P

Anyway...

I think you should keep every past GSL event as the old names, Code S and Code A, but start using the Premiere/Challenger name tags from this season onwards. Wherever possible, try to use the official name of a league at the time in the database. It's the fairest way to do it.

I know right?We should base ranking on popular opinion (1$ per rating point)

Some fighting-game communities actually do that for qualitative character tier lists (minus the $1), they get community (or trusted players) to discuss and vote and they take the averages. Obviously it doesn't work for SC2 players because they change in 'skill' constantly and there is thousands of them, but just saying =P

Anyway...

I think you should keep every past GSL event as the old names, Code S and Code A, but start using the Premiere/Challenger name tags from this season onwards. Wherever possible, try to use the official name of a league at the time in the database. It's the fairest way to do it.

Obviously we wouldn't change the old GSL seasons. This change is in regards to the current GSL and the coming GSL/OSLs

On April 18 2013 19:44 Wodger wrote:WCS 2013 Season 1 Europe Premier Qualifier Day 1 Ro64 Harstem Nomatch 2-0 instead of Harstem Noname 2-0Monty plays protoss you have him as terran in all the wcs qualifiers

Fixed the Harstem/Nomatch match, thanks!

As for Monty, I noticed that, too, but I couldn't find any info on his apparent race switch (He's listed as Terran in TLPD, too. ). He played all the WCS Europe qualifiers. Did he play Protoss in all of them? And did he switch races for HotS? I'm currently not sure how many of his matches I need to switch his race.

On April 18 2013 19:44 Wodger wrote:WCS 2013 Season 1 Europe Premier Qualifier Day 1 Ro64 Harstem Nomatch 2-0 instead of Harstem Noname 2-0Monty plays protoss you have him as terran in all the wcs qualifiers

Fixed the Harstem/Nomatch match, thanks!

As for Monty, I noticed that, too, but I couldn't find any info on his apparent race switch (He's listed as Terran in TLPD, too. ). He played all the WCS Europe qualifiers. Did he play Protoss in all of them? And did he switch races for HotS? I'm currently not sure how many of his matches I need to switch his race.

I can assure you the Monti from the WCS EU qualifiers plays Protoss. He played that in 2012 too, so I don't think he recently switched.

On April 18 2013 19:44 Wodger wrote:WCS 2013 Season 1 Europe Premier Qualifier Day 1 Ro64 Harstem Nomatch 2-0 instead of Harstem Noname 2-0Monty plays protoss you have him as terran in all the wcs qualifiers

Fixed the Harstem/Nomatch match, thanks!

As for Monty, I noticed that, too, but I couldn't find any info on his apparent race switch (He's listed as Terran in TLPD, too. ). He played all the WCS Europe qualifiers. Did he play Protoss in all of them? And did he switch races for HotS? I'm currently not sure how many of his matches I need to switch his race.

I can assure you the Monti from the WCS EU qualifiers plays Protoss. He played that in 2012 too, so I don't think he recently switched.

I've changed his race for those matches now. Not sure about the other two HotS matches he played, though. I can't find any race information on the cup's homepages.

With the recent WCS changes, we are working on implementing the GSL/OSL as part of the WCS hierarchy and we are currently discussing whether or not to change the names to something like this:WCS -> (year) -> (season) -> (region) -> (premier/challenger or Code S/A) -> (qualifiers/main tournament)

Instead of keeping our old GSL 2013 Season X hierarchy. However we are not sure which name to give to GSL since most people still associate WCS KR with GSL Code S/A.

On April 18 2013 19:44 Wodger wrote:WCS 2013 Season 1 Europe Premier Qualifier Day 1 Ro64 Harstem Nomatch 2-0 instead of Harstem Noname 2-0Monty plays protoss you have him as terran in all the wcs qualifiers

Fixed the Harstem/Nomatch match, thanks!

As for Monty, I noticed that, too, but I couldn't find any info on his apparent race switch (He's listed as Terran in TLPD, too. ). He played all the WCS Europe qualifiers. Did he play Protoss in all of them? And did he switch races for HotS? I'm currently not sure how many of his matches I need to switch his race.

I can assure you the Monti from the WCS EU qualifiers plays Protoss. He played that in 2012 too, so I don't think he recently switched.

I've changed his race for those matches now. Not sure about the other two HotS matches he played, though. I can't find any race information on the cup's homepages.

Did he switch his race, or is he a race picker?

There might be 2 montys, all his replays here are protoss and all the replays here are terran. If it is the same guy he switched to protoss in 2011

On April 18 2013 19:44 Wodger wrote:WCS 2013 Season 1 Europe Premier Qualifier Day 1 Ro64 Harstem Nomatch 2-0 instead of Harstem Noname 2-0Monty plays protoss you have him as terran in all the wcs qualifiers

Fixed the Harstem/Nomatch match, thanks!

As for Monty, I noticed that, too, but I couldn't find any info on his apparent race switch (He's listed as Terran in TLPD, too. ). He played all the WCS Europe qualifiers. Did he play Protoss in all of them? And did he switch races for HotS? I'm currently not sure how many of his matches I need to switch his race.

I can assure you the Monti from the WCS EU qualifiers plays Protoss. He played that in 2012 too, so I don't think he recently switched.

I've changed his race for those matches now. Not sure about the other two HotS matches he played, though. I can't find any race information on the cup's homepages.

Did he switch his race, or is he a race picker?

There might be 2 montys, all his replays here are protoss and all the replays here are terran. If it is the same guy he switched to protoss in 2011

Hmm, you might be up to something there. It's either two guys or the same guy who made two accounts at esl.eu. Nicknak's Battle.net page lists his last game played as 21/7/2012, so for it to be the same guy he'd have to have bought another SC2 copy, too. Sounds unlikely.

First, a more serious one... do you think there is any chance of there being a way to view the ranking of a period not as an absolute value, but as a difference from the previous period? So when you turn this setting on or go to this page or whatever, #1 ranked for the current period is the one with the greatest improvement since the last period. In a sense, rather than it being a measure of the ranking, it would be a measure of the slope/derivative of the ranking for players at particular periods. I think it would be a fun/interesting way to see which players made the biggest splash at particular times, or players who are on the way up.

Because there would be an awful lot of 0s potentially, it could perhaps only include players who played a game during the last period, or simply be restricted to a top 10/20 list rather than a full thing.

Secondly, a crazy and probably not terribly useful feature... but would it be possible to generate a heat map of a single elimination bracket, with respect to the average (or some other measure) rating of the players in the bracket as predicted throughout the tourney? To identify things like quadrants of death or brackets etc.

Maybe you need a table of event aliases in the database to go along with the player aliases? The real events at GOMTV right now should be WCS > 2013 Season 1 > KR > Premier League, but "KR" should have an alias of "GSL" and "Premier League" should have an alias of "Code S".

By the way, thank you so much for making the underlying database available. I'm doing some playing around with the data, and I love that you've made so much of this work available in such a convenient form.

On April 24 2013 01:07 Serimek wrote:I was wondering : what's the MC number ?

You are doing a wonderful job with Aligulac, gg !

The MC number works like the Erdős number or the Kevin Bacon number: MC gets assigned an MC number of 0. Everyone who played an offline match against him gets a 1. Everyone who played an offline match against someone who played an offline match against MC gets an MC number of 2, etc.

MC was chosen because he had the largest number of different opponents in offline tournaments at the time.

On April 24 2013 01:13 Tobon wrote:Maybe you need a table of event aliases in the database to go along with the player aliases? The real events at GOMTV right now should be WCS > 2013 Season 1 > KR > Premier League, but "KR" should have an alias of "GSL" and "Premier League" should have an alias of "Code S".

By the way, thank you so much for making the underlying database available. I'm doing some playing around with the data, and I love that you've made so much of this work available in such a convenient form.

We choose KR because it won't be GSL next season, and it gives more consistency. We are still using code S/A due to popular vote.

The biggest feature I'd like to see is to be able to look up head-to-head history for players. I'm not sure if there's a way to do this that I'm missing but currently it's only possible to filter match history by race etc and not against a specific player, right?

On April 25 2013 01:06 sitromit wrote:The biggest feature I'd like to see is to be able to look up head-to-head history for players. I'm not sure if there's a way to do this that I'm missing but currently it's only possible to filter match history by race etc and not against a specific player, right?

The leading/lagging is an indicator of the 5 highest ranked of each race. It's in the faq :-)

On the period list you can see OP/UP fields, and in the infobox for each period, the same data is given as "leading" and "lagging" race. This is an indicator showing which races are most and least prominent near the top of the list. Specifically, for each race imagine a hypothetical player with a rating equal to the mean of the ratings of the top five players of that race, and imagine these three players playing very many games against each other. If the players were of equal strength, each of them would score about 50%, however, in reality, one of them may score, say, 10% more than that. The race that scores the most in this scenario is the "OP", or "leading" race, and the race that scores the least is the "UP", or "lagging" race.

This is provided as a way to analyse the metagame shifts near the top of the skill ladder, and should not be taken as actual evidence for real game imbalance.

I just want to say that I absolutely love what the team has done on Aligulac. I discovered it yesterday and have been playing around a ton with all of the prediction features, and just really love the whole site design.

Idea: would you be able to rate team decision-making in Team Leagues with the all-kill format? Theoretically, since your model is fairly accurate, a teams best decision would be to choose the player on their team with the largest difference in the vX rating for the challenger and the vY rating for the player that just won. Do some teams follow this guideline more closely? Do those teams win more often due to these decisions?

Question: Would adding in certain datasets like, for instance, every round of every Playhem daily, skew the ratings? I've read some concerns that a lack of cross-region play or an oversampled region can cause certain populations to have higher ratings than they should. What would a mountain of games like that do to the ratings, and how would it change that really cool visualization of different "communities"?

Props to you (and everyone who works on Aligulac) again for already answering more questions than I could hope to pose :D

On May 08 2013 11:32 justdmg wrote:Idea: would you be able to rate team decision-making in Team Leagues with the all-kill format? Theoretically, since your model is fairly accurate, a teams best decision would be to choose the player on their team with the largest difference in the vX rating for the challenger and the vY rating for the player that just won. Do some teams follow this guideline more closely? Do those teams win more often due to these decisions?

I don't want to promise to implement something like this, but I've actually looked at it before. Monk and Waxangel contacted me and wanted to do some evaluation of the coaches in proleague. I think this was after two rounds, when EG-TL sucked hard, and they wanted to know whether the EG-TL coach was to blame or not. (I don't think this was ever published, and it was two months ago, so I feel I can do it here instead.)

The idea we had was calculating rating discrepancies for each game played. That is, if a player has a mean rating of 1500, with 1400 vZ, 1500 vP and 1600 vT, that player has a discrepancy of -100 vZ, 0 vP and +100 vT. Clearly it is advisable to match him up against Terrans, and one of the jobs of a coach is to ensure that his players end up in good matchups.

In a sense, the mean discrepancy of a team is a measure of how much extra skill the coach is able to squeeze out of his team by manipulating the lineup.

It is interesting to note that Woongjin is the only team with a significantly positive discrepancy, and for some reason SK is easily worst. EG-TL seems bad, but by no stretch of the imagination out of the league.

It is also curious that the overall mean discrepancy is negative, but one should note that this isn't necessarily a zero sum game. It's okay to choose a player with -50 discrepancy if that causes the opponent to get -100 (since you can control the race he gets to face, right). So actually what I should have been looking at is net discrepancy. It'd be interesting to redo these calculations using that rule instead.

If you're interested, in the spoiler is a list of mean discrepancies for each player. Poor Thorzain faced too many Zergs....

On May 08 2013 11:32 justdmg wrote:Question: Would adding in certain datasets like, for instance, every round of every Playhem daily, skew the ratings? I've read some concerns that a lack of cross-region play or an oversampled region can cause certain populations to have higher ratings than they should. What would a mountain of games like that do to the ratings, and how would it change that really cool visualization of different "communities"?

Kinda, you can think of it like this:

More games within a community will cause the ratings in that community to spread out, so the gap between the top and the bottom is larger. Since the international scene usually plays more often, you get something like this:

|----------------------------------------------------| International

|-------------------------| Korean

More games across communities will cause the communities themselves to adjust relative to each other. So if we take the above ratings and then get some cross-region games, we might get something like this:

|----------------------------------------------------| International

|-------------------------| Korean

So the reason you see international players mixed up in the top is two-fold. First, there aren't enough cross-region games (yet), or in other words, Koreans are still consistently gaining points from foreigners whenever they meet. Second, there international rating pool is more spread out.

There will be an update coming up which will cause offline games to be weighted about twice as much as online games. Since the Korean scene is mostly offline compared to the international scene, this will widen the Korean pool a fair bit, but the other problem is still present.

Btw, those charts are purely qualitative. In reality the difference isn't as extreme as I made it seem.

I'd like to take a look at the databse but I'm not into programming at all. Is there some easy way to transform the data into a simple matrix, that I can use in Matlab, that shows chronologically the games and who won against who? That would be enough information for me.

Okay so I tried punching through this with a bit of handwork. At the moment I am only using the ELOsystem and no racespecific MUs. I have applied the 'function' 1000 times to increase the pointflow between the regions/kespa/esfplayers for players with more then 20 games and I think my result isn't that bad. My top 10:

Though I have to say Kespa seems a little too strong here. Maybe a few less Iterations would be better. Also I only use ~45k matches. Don't know where the rest have gone. All in all this just means, that if the Kespapros and Esfpros are playing at the same strength that they played with up until now - Kespa will at some point smash ESF.

On May 08 2013 18:24 TheBB wrote:I don't want to promise to implement something like this, but I've actually looked at it before. Monk and Waxangel contacted me and wanted to do some evaluation of the coaches in proleague. I think this was after two rounds, when EG-TL sucked hard, and they wanted to know whether the EG-TL coach was to blame or not. (I don't think this was ever published, and it was two months ago, so I feel I can do it here instead.)

The idea we had was calculating rating discrepancies for each game played. That is, if a player has a mean rating of 1500, with 1400 vZ, 1500 vP and 1600 vT, that player has a discrepancy of -100 vZ, 0 vP and +100 vT. Clearly it is advisable to match him up against Terrans, and one of the jobs of a coach is to ensure that his players end up in good matchups.

In a sense, the mean discrepancy of a team is a measure of how much extra skill the coach is able to squeeze out of his team by manipulating the lineup.

It is interesting to note that Woongjin is the only team with a significantly positive discrepancy, and for some reason SK is easily worst. EG-TL seems bad, but by no stretch of the imagination out of the league.

It is also curious that the overall mean discrepancy is negative, but one should note that this isn't necessarily a zero sum game. It's okay to choose a player with -50 discrepancy if that causes the opponent to get -100 (since you can control the race he gets to face, right). So actually what I should have been looking at is net discrepancy. It'd be interesting to redo these calculations using that rule instead.

Haha of course you've already done it! And I totally agree, I think that the net discrepancy is what I was getting at (in a roundabout way) with my description. I was thinking today about how game # and match score effects a coaches decisions as well: Up 4-1 with a couple of Aces in your bag, playing a negative net discrepancy player isn't bad coaching: it's giving the "new guy" a chance in as close an analog to "garbage time" in basketball that you are really going to see.

Thanks for the explanation of the scoring as well, I'll be interested to see how the changes effect everything!

I am trying to figure out a good "StartEloMatrix" and I use d=sum((won games of Player1- expected won games of Player1)^2) as a rough measurement as to how good my StartEloMatrix is. Could you calculate this d-value with your method of calculating Elo? I want to know how good my model is compared to yours. It's enough to do it just for the mainelo value.

For example if in one match the predicted outcome is 1.8-1.2 and the result is 2-1, then d= (2-1.8)^2=0.04. And then do it for all the matches and sum it up.

On May 09 2013 08:07 Greenei wrote:Okay so I tried punching through this with a bit of handwork. At the moment I am only using the ELOsystem and no racespecific MUs. I have applied the 'function' 1000 times to increase the pointflow between the regions/kespa/esfplayers for players with more then 20 games and I think my result isn't that bad. My top 10:

Though I have to say Kespa seems a little too strong here. Maybe a few less Iterations would be better. Also I only use ~45k matches. Don't know where the rest have gone. All in all this just means, that if the Kespapros and Esfpros are playing at the same strength that they played with up until now - Kespa will at some point smash ESF.

This is a list I could agree with. Been saying forever ELO is 100x better system than what is being used here (which is based off glicko, but isn't even close tbh due to adjustments to race match ups and fake games and not actually taking proper RD into account).

Using the actual Glicko system would be great too

Bug Fixes Fixed an issue where, when facing a SlayerS terran, completing a hatchery would cause a medivac and 8 marines to randomly spawn nearby and attack it.

On May 09 2013 08:07 Greenei wrote:Okay so I tried punching through this with a bit of handwork. At the moment I am only using the ELOsystem and no racespecific MUs. I have applied the 'function' 1000 times to increase the pointflow between the regions/kespa/esfplayers for players with more then 20 games and I think my result isn't that bad. My top 10:

Though I have to say Kespa seems a little too strong here. Maybe a few less Iterations would be better. Also I only use ~45k matches. Don't know where the rest have gone. All in all this just means, that if the Kespapros and Esfpros are playing at the same strength that they played with up until now - Kespa will at some point smash ESF.

This is a list I could agree with. Been saying forever ELO is 100x better system than what is being used here (which is based off glicko, but isn't even close tbh due to adjustments to race match ups and fake games).

Using the actual Glicko system would be great too

Question: Is it as predictive as ours? Not being defensive, I am genuinely interested/curious :-)

On May 13 2013 04:17 Grovbolle wrote:TheBB is on vacation right now. Also we use glicko not ELO as far as I know (not sure if that was what you asked though)

Oh ok. Maybe he'll see it when he comes back.

I want to compare my specific ELO approach to his Glicko approach and see if we get similar results. Glicko is btw. pretty much a development of ELO.

This is a list I could agree with. Been saying forever ELO is 100x better system than what is being used here (which is based off glicko, but isn't even close tbh due to adjustments to race match ups and fake games and not actually taking proper RD into account).

Using the actual Glicko system would be great too

Using just ELO is not improving the list by much. The list that I posted looked like this, because I had a different startelo distribution. I have dropped it since, because it fucks with the predictability too much. I am now working on an alternative list that has good predictability AND makes sense to the knowlagable Starcraftplayer (read: adjusts the ELO in the foreigner and koreapool).

This is the List I am working with right now but is still subject to change:

LifeInnovationFlashSymbolPartingSoSLeenockSoulkeyPoltRoRoBomberRainYodaVioletYonghwaSquirtle(with data from 7.5.2013 or something)

On May 16 2013 22:31 graNite wrote:Hello BB, is it possible to make a little statistic that shows how many times aligulac predicted the right winner out of all matches? Would be interesting to see its guessing statistics.

It gets the right winner in 59.9% of games and 62.4% of matches. Doesn't sound terribly impressive, but with that hitrate it would make #2 on Liquibet, with 315 points.

I have a question about rating changes and how they relate to the intervals.

When new ratings are determined at each interval, are they taken game by game, or are they, as the layout on a period adjustment page (e.g. http://aligulac.com/players/48-INnoVation/period/85/) taken as a whole? In other words, is the rating determined by the fact that (at the time of linking) Innovation's TvZ for the period is 9-2 with an average opposition of 1772, or is this simply a summary and ratings are calculated game per game?

I ask this because if it's done as a whole per period, then Bo1s would have a much larger impact on the result because the likelihood function works on expected ratios, but individual games are binary. If a player has a 75% chance to win in a Bo1, and does win that, then this isn't balanced against a median outcome, but instead gives the player a much higher performance rating than what should actually be derived from such a scenario.

In other words, if a player with a rating of 1900 goes 1-0 against 4 players whose average rating is 1700, is it the same as going 4-0 against a single player in a single series? The former's median outcome from prediction, on a game per game basis would be the sum of the expected median outcomes of each individual one: 4-0. Whereas the expected median outcome of the latter is 4-3. If both scenarios are are weighted equally (where a person won 4 out of 4 games versus winning 4 out of 7 and losing 0 out of 7, even though the last 3 didn't have to be played) then chaining Bo1s would give a higher rating return than fewer long series.

On May 24 2013 06:36 Grayson Carlyle wrote:In other words, if a player with a rating of 1900 goes 1-0 against 4 players whose average rating is 1700, is it the same as going 4-0 against a single player in a single series?

Yes, this is the same.

On May 24 2013 06:36 Grayson Carlyle wrote:The former's median outcome from prediction, on a game per game basis would be the sum of the expected median outcomes of each individual one: 4-0. Whereas the expected median outcome of the latter is 4-3.

Ah, the median predicted outcome (MPO) you see on the prediction pages are not the same as the expected outcome (EO) you see on the adjustment overview. The differences are:

MPO is always integral, while EO are real numbers.

When calculating MPO, we don't know how long the match will go. It's a measure of the closeness of the players, not a good estimate of the length of the match (in fact, it will overestimate match lengths consistently). The EO is expected score given the total number of games in the match.

So in your example, if the 1900 guy 4-0's the 1700 guy, that is four games. The EO can then be something like 2.8-1.2, or some other numbers who sum up to four. Of course these are impossible scores to actually get in a Bo7, even if we were to round them off, but the match format is inconsequential to the rating calculator.

So the EO is actual expected score given the games that were actually played (and is comparable to the same concept in Elo ratings), while the MPO is just "our best guess" at the actually possible outcome that would be least surprising.

That does clarify it a bit, but it doesn't address the issue that the expected outcome of a Bo1 is always on average 50% away from actual possible outcomes, so playing Bo1s still has a larger impact on a player's rating (both up and down) than longer series, whereas longer series are actually a better indication of a player's true rating, but they will inevitably have a lesser effect on the accuracy.

Grayson: If you take several individual BO1s together, the average of the *absolute value* of the difference between the expected and actual outcome is 0.5. But you should not be ignoring the sign of the difference. Some will be wins and some losses.

On May 24 2013 23:47 TheBB wrote:Playing four Bo1s against the same person and winning them all 1-0 has exactly the same effect as playing one Bo7 and winning it 4-0.

In a longer match you can get closer to the expected outcome overall, but of course a longer match means more games, so your rating will change that much more.

That's my point though, is that playing 4 Bo1s should not have the same effect since it is impossible for them to be anywhere close to the expected outcome except in a situation where a player is highly favoured over the other. The possible outcomes of 4 Bo1s against different people is far more limited and doesn't give nearly as much useful, predictive power as someone winning a Bo7 4-0. The latter is very significant for determining skill, whereas the Bo1s are not significant. However, they both have the same effect on rating.

Sorry, but I really can't understand why it's less significant for someone to win four Bo1s in a row than to win a Bo7 4-0, since they are the exact same thing.

If the expected outcome of a single game is 0.5-0.5, then after four Bo1s it's possible to be off by 2, 1, or 0, and after a Bo7 it's possible to be off by 2, 1.5, 1, 0.5 or 0. It provides finer resolution but the extremes are identical.

If you 4-0 someone, why should it matter if it was part of a BO7 (cut short because you already won) or 4 individual BO1s? Don't they both show exactly the same information? They played 4 times, and one player won all 4. Why should it matter if it was part of a match or not? If they played 3 more games, the previous 4-0 result should have no impact on the results of the next games.

If you are talking about psychological effects, yes those are ignored by pretty much all rating systems. There are all kinds of things outside of the game that are ignored -- like how much sleep the player got before the match etc.

==============ETA an example conversation:KD: Hey aligulac, TerranOP beat ZergSux 4-0. What are their new ratings?Aligulac: KD, first you need to tell me, was the 4-0 part of a BO7? Or Two BO3s? Or 4 BO1s? Or maybe it's a BO101, but they had to stop early?KD: I don't know, I just know they played 4 games and TerranOP won them all.Aligulac: Sorry I can't update their ratings without knowing what the match format was.

This simply isn't the way rating systems work. They always assume each game is an independent event.

Different subject: I saw the graph of points transfer from foreigners to Koreans. You could go back to the beginning and increase the initial seeded ratings of Koreans until the points transfer is near zero.

On May 25 2013 02:15 KillerDucky wrote:Different subject: I saw the graph of points transfer from foreigners to Koreans. You could go back to the beginning and increase the initial seeded ratings of Koreans until the points transfer is near zero.

Yeah, I've thought about doing exactly this. I'm sure it would help a lot with these perceived problems.

I've been promising a change in the rating algorithm for a while now, and finally it's here. The changes are numerous, but the most significant are:

Koreans now start with 1200 points, not 1000. This might be a bit controversial, but it goes a long way to fixing the rating discrepancy between the Korean and foreign scenes, and it is justified by the numbers.Offline games are now weighted heavier than online games by a factor of 1.5. This has sped up the point transfer from ESF to KeSPA.There are no longer any "fake games" in added to avoid infinities.I won't promise that this is the final version, however!

The recent model of basing the calculations seems to be the move in the right direction. I'm pleased with the increase to Korean numbers, and changing online tournaments to weigh less than offline is just perfect. Now when I look at the rankings, it seems reasonable and accurate because the inflation from online games is gone and KeSPA is better represented.

On June 02 2013 07:45 monk wrote:How was the number 1200 derived? Was it mostly an arbitrary number? Or something that you got through trial and error? Or is there a mathematical significance?

Well, I tried tracking the point transfer to the Korean scene. 1200 is definitely on the low end. If you want the most accurate ratings today it should probably be at least 1400. But if I do that, many of the earlier lists start looking really weird. So I landed on 1200 as a compromise.

I conjecture that the best choice is a time-dependent function that starts near 1000 in February 2010 and increases slowly since then, but I haven't really bothered looking into that yet. For example, something like

I'm amazed by how much this has been improving, definitely deserves more attention (integration with TLPD maybe?)

I can't say I agree with the "1200 points for Koreans" thing. It seems arbitrary and diminishes Aligulac's value as a totally impartial ranking. I think you've correctly identified the cause of the issue, but I'd like to see something a bit less arbitrary. how about:1) When a new player enters the system, their starting rating is (some function of) the average rating of their region. Where "region" means country or BNet server.2) Is it necessary to make any assumption at all about a player's rating before they play any games? Maybe their initial rating could be a function of their first 10 games or something (like placement matches). Maybe there's a way to play with the way ratings deviation changes over time to emulate this effect to some extent. Can points ever be created from nothing, or do people just exchange points with each other? If the latter, maybe make an exception for the first 10 matches to correct inaccuracies with the 1000 assumption.

I think it would help a great deal to have tooltips or little "[?]" links everywhere to explain what everything means. When I see "Leading race: Terran", I'd like to be able to read a summary of what level of play is considered/how it's calculated/etc.

Also, maybe I'm dumb but I can't see a way to go to the page for an event from a player's list of games. This would be useful, I think?

Finally, I'm sceptical that "Most specialised vX" is a sufficiently interesting/important statistic to feature so prominently on the rankings page. Especially since you presumably have to weight it by rating so you dont get random players nobody's heard of.

On June 02 2013 14:19 mkwn wrote:When a new player enters the system, their starting rating is (some function of) the average rating of their region. Where "region" means country or BNet server.

I think that could prove unfair for certain countries.

I mean, inflating Koreans makes sense from an empirical standpoint, since their region is by far the most cut-throat and competitive, even down to the ladder.

On the other hand, while your suggestion might seem fairer in theory, it could also underrate players in regions where there's a big discrepancy between average rating and top player(s). I took a look at Norway, just as an example (I'm sure there are better ones still): We have 69 Norwegian players in our database, of which only 10 find themselves at 1000 rating or higher, with an average rating of 860. Do you think it would be fair towards players such as Snute and TargA, simply because their fellow countrymen haven't achieved the same success?

I'm sure BB will try it out at some point, even if just for the sake of it, but IMHO your solution will only create numerous smaller problems for the rating in scenes where there's only a few relatively strong players.

As for BNet servers, we don't have that information because it would be irrelevant since many of the players outside Korea practice on more than one server.

On June 02 2013 14:19 mkwn wrote:I think it would help a great deal to have tooltips or little "[?]" links everywhere to explain what everything means. When I see "Leading race: Terran", I'd like to be able to read a summary of what level of play is considered/how it's calculated/etc.

Also, maybe I'm dumb but I can't see a way to go to the page for an event from a player's list of games. This would be useful, I think?

If all the Norwegian players have a low ranking, and two new unknown Norwegian players named Snute and Targa enter the scene, what do you think is the fairest initial ranking to give them? I think a low ranking is pretty appropriate, without prior knowledge that they'll be good.

Any good player who enters the scene will be initially valued too low. The rating system is designed to quickly push their rating up to match their true skill. The issue at hand is that the pool of points for whole regions is incorrect, and this takes a long time to fix because there is much less interaction between regions than within them.

By BNet server, I meant do it by country but group together countries that have the same server (europe, america, korea, china, sea?) The idea being, try to find some natural classification so that each group is very connected. You could even do some mathsy stuff and decide which countries to group together dynamically, based on the connectedness of the data. Might make an interesting "reports" page too, to see how countries interact.

just a suggestion, anyway.

@Grovbolle:

I mean, on soulkey's page i can see the match history ("Most recent results"), i'd like to be able to click on each match to go to the relevant event. Not a big deal.

They're not independent. Think of it like this: part of Soulkey's win against Innovation must have been due to his general skill level, and not just his ZvT skill level. You can get funny-looking results like these if someone plays overwhelmingly against one or two races (like here, 7/8 of Soulkey's games are ZvT).

The numbers are actually 1771.2348961374 (rounded down to 1711) and 1773.7245113775 (rounded up to 1774), so the increase is 2.4896152400999654 (rounded down to 2).

If all the Norwegian players have a low ranking, and two new unknown Norwegian players named Snute and Targa enter the scene, what do you think is the fairest initial ranking to give them? I think a low ranking is pretty appropriate, without prior knowledge that they'll be good.

Any good player who enters the scene will be initially valued too low. The rating system is designed to quickly push their rating up to match their true skill. The issue at hand is that the pool of points for whole regions is incorrect, and this takes a long time to fix because there is much less interaction between regions than within them.

By BNet server, I meant do it by country but group together countries that have the same server (europe, america, korea, china, sea?) The idea being, try to find some natural classification so that each group is very connected. You could even do some mathsy stuff and decide which countries to group together dynamically, based on the connectedness of the data. Might make an interesting "reports" page too, to see how countries interact.

just a suggestion, anyway.

@Grovbolle:

I mean, on soulkey's page i can see the match history ("Most recent results"), i'd like to be able to click on each match to go to the relevant event. Not a big deal.

The "most recent results" currently doesn't link to events. I think it is a matter of not cluttering the page too much, but it should be doable.

Ahh, this "point pool" problem is very difficult to work out. Even the very act of assigning players to pools like "foreigner" and "Korean" seems to taint the purity of the system. But, the fact that foreigners play foreigners often and Koreans play Koreans often means (before the recent change) an average Korean would be rated the same as an average foreigner, which is obviously not ideal for rankings. I think theBB is right in that these player pools themselves could be considered to have their own ratings (like right now the Korean pool are rated 1200 and the foreigner pool is rated 1000) but this ratio shouldn't be fixed, rather it should be movable...somehow...

As MasterOfPuppets pointed out, someone like Stephano who is far better than his fellow countrymen might suffer from such a system. I feel that it wouldn't be as bad of an issue as it seems. A foreigner who is truly at the skill level of Koreans would dominate his player pool even harder than in an even system, which helps to make up for his player pool nerf.

Another idea: when a player plays someone from a different pool, increase the significance of the match. I dunno.

On June 02 2013 18:14 slowbacontron wrote:Ahh, this "point pool" problem is very difficult to work out. Even the very act of assigning players to pools like "foreigner" and "Korean" seems to taint the purity of the system. But, the fact that foreigners play foreigners often and Koreans play Koreans often means (before the recent change) an average Korean would be rated the same as an average foreigner, which is obviously not ideal for rankings. I think theBB is right in that these player pools themselves could be considered to have their own ratings (like right now the Korean pool are rated 1200 and the foreigner pool is rated 1000) but this ratio shouldn't be fixed, rather it should be movable...somehow...

As MasterOfPuppets pointed out, someone like Stephano who is far better than his fellow countrymen might suffer from such a system. I feel that it wouldn't be as bad of an issue as it seems. A foreigner who is truly at the skill level of Koreans would dominate his player pool even harder than in an even system, which helps to make up for his player pool nerf.

Another idea: when a player plays someone from a different pool, increase the significance of the match. I dunno.

E: mkwn hit on much of what I was thinking as well.

The "Koreans start with 1200" solution has helped bridge the "kespa gap" so that the list has caught up now, although it is a bit subjective, the evidence does support this kind of solution.

Hmm, are the 1200-rating-Koreans everyone with a Korean nationality in the database? Since then the system would favor players like SeoHyeon and KingKong, too, which is probably not the intention. An additional requirement could be that a player also had to have been in any of the Kespa/ESF teams at some point to slightly narrow down the list of naturally gifted players.

(Hey, I might be a dev too, but I have nothing to do with the rating system, so I can ask stupid questions just like everyone else! )

On June 03 2013 06:00 Conti wrote:Hmm, are the 1200-rating-Koreans everyone with a Korean nationality in the database? Since then the system would favor players like SeoHyeon and KingKong, too, which is probably not the intention. An additional requirement could be that a player also had to have been in any of the Kespa/ESF teams at some point to slightly narrow down the list of naturally gifted players.

(Hey, I might be a dev too, but I have nothing to do with the rating system, so I can ask stupid questions just like everyone else! )

KingKong was part of Startale for a while. I think it'd be found that a high amount of low-profile Koreans have been part of an eSF team at some point in their career.

On June 03 2013 06:00 Conti wrote:Hmm, are the 1200-rating-Koreans everyone with a Korean nationality in the database? Since then the system would favor players like SeoHyeon and KingKong, too, which is probably not the intention. An additional requirement could be that a player also had to have been in any of the Kespa/ESF teams at some point to slightly narrow down the list of naturally gifted players.

(Hey, I might be a dev too, but I have nothing to do with the rating system, so I can ask stupid questions just like everyone else! )

KingKong was part of Startale for a while. I think it'd be found that a high amount of low-profile Koreans have been part of an eSF team at some point in their career.

Hah, true, I missed that. I was trying not to exclude all the high profile Koreans that left the Korean teams at some point. Eh, it'd still be slightly better. Not sure if it'd be worth the effort, though.

On June 03 2013 08:24 FrodaN wrote:Have you guys done any cross referencing your winrates by map as well? Always curious to see likelihood/probability based off of the map pool.

Our system completely abstracts maps out of the equation so to speak, and while I can't make a promise either way (and neither can others on the team, I would assume), there are no plans as of now to introduce them into the system. I will note however that we did not discuss this matter exhaustively.

My personal take on the idea of introducing maps into the mix, which is not representative of the team's opinion or anyone else's is as follows: it's simply not worth it. From a realistic, match submission standpoint, it would require far more effort to add maps to matches, even more so considering we already have almost 60k of them in the database already. Not only that, but some events we have extremely limited information on, which unfortunately doesn't include maps. So that's the practicality aspect. Assuming we had two dozen more dedicated volunteers than we already do, willing to scour the interwebs for details, wouldn't the payoff theoretically make this worth it? Well no. Ratings and predictions also being based off of maps might be more precise for people like Mvp, Stephano and MC who have played massive amounts of games, but for others it would only increase the uncertainty and volatility, simply because there aren't enough games played. This matter is exacerbated by the fact that map pools change, and most maps are neither Antiga nor Daybreak, in that they have much shorter a lifespan. In a world where there's 2 or 3 times as many tournament games played consistently, sure, it might well be worth it, but as it is I personally believe it would only add more uncertainty into the system.

Anyway I hope I didn't ramble too much and my response touched on what you were asking. If not, I at least hope it preemptively answered other questions that people might have raised.

On June 03 2013 08:24 FrodaN wrote:Have you guys done any cross referencing your winrates by map as well? Always curious to see likelihood/probability based off of the map pool.

Our system completely abstracts maps out of the equation so to speak, and while I can't make a promise either way (and neither can others on the team, I would assume), there are no plans as of now to introduce them into the system. I will note however that we did not discuss this matter exhaustively.

My personal take on the idea of introducing maps into the mix, which is not representative of the team's opinion or anyone else's is as follows: it's simply not worth it. From a realistic, match submission standpoint, it would require far more effort to add maps to matches, even more so considering we already have almost 60k of them in the database already. Not only that, but some events we have extremely limited information on, which unfortunately doesn't include maps. So that's the practicality aspect. Assuming we had two dozen more dedicated volunteers than we already do, willing to scour the interwebs for details, wouldn't the payoff theoretically make this worth it? Well no. Ratings and predictions also being based off of maps might be more precise for people like Mvp, Stephano and MC who have played massive amounts of games, but for others it would only increase the uncertainty and volatility, simply because there aren't enough games played. This matter is exacerbated by the fact that map pools change, and most maps are neither Antiga nor Daybreak, in that they have much shorter a lifespan. In a world where there's 2 or 3 times as many tournament games played consistently, sure, it might well be worth it, but as it is I personally believe it would only add more uncertainty into the system.

Anyway I hope I didn't ramble too much and my response touched on what you were asking. If not, I at least hope it preemptively answered other questions that people might have raised.

^_^

We have almost 60k matches, but more than twice the amount of games. So yeah, 130.000 games need to be classified if maps are to be included

Suggestion for ranking pages (e.g. http://aligulac.com/periods/85):If it doesn't slow page generation down too much, adding in coloured +/- values for rank and ratings instead of the arrows would remove the necessity of browsing through a lot of pages to find those numbers.

On June 13 2013 04:09 Grayson Carlyle wrote:Suggestion for ranking pages (e.g. http://aligulac.com/periods/85):If it doesn't slow page generation down too much, adding in coloured +/- values for rank and ratings instead of the arrows would remove the necessity of browsing through a lot of pages to find those numbers.

I don't think ratings decay can be incorporated into the glicko system. There is a linear time decay of deviation though it is currently unknown if it is significant by any measure. I'll will investigate that soon (this weekend probably) but since the linear coefficient is strongly linked to the predicting power I cannot guarantee that even if I find a way to improve it, we could implement it.

Still I do agree with you, we need to have a way to differentiate players who play consistently and thus deserve their ratings and those who don't.

On February 28 2013 00:16 Arzar wrote:Is there a way with Aligulac to plot the rating of say the 50 best players over the last two years all at once ?

For a while it was possible with the site mengsk.com (unfortunately the site is now dead). You would have all the graph of all the players superimposed and selecting a particular player would highlight his curve. It was quite fascinating to see the progression of a player ELO along the years.

For an illustration, the graphs from mengsk.com have been used in this TL article (comparing broodwar and chess)

I still think this could be one of the coolest feature to add to aligulac.

I really wanted to see what a graph like this could be for sc2, so I fiddled with aligulac ranking database and some script and excel sheet today.

Here is one example with Mvp :

I did the same thing for the 30 players who have achieved the highest ranking according to aligulac during the past 3 years.

On February 28 2013 00:16 Arzar wrote:Is there a way with Aligulac to plot the rating of say the 50 best players over the last two years all at once ?

For a while it was possible with the site mengsk.com (unfortunately the site is now dead). You would have all the graph of all the players superimposed and selecting a particular player would highlight his curve. It was quite fascinating to see the progression of a player ELO along the years.

For an illustration, the graphs from mengsk.com have been used in this TL article (comparing broodwar and chess)

I still think this could be one of the coolest feature to add to aligulac.

I really wanted to see what a graph like this could be for sc2, so I fiddled with aligulac ranking database and some script and excel sheet today.

Here is one example with Mvp :

I did the same thing for the 30 players who have achieved the highest ranking according to aligulac during the past 3 years.

It would be really cool if you could filter the match history depending on the opponents rating.like the date option which is really awesome btw: (opponents rating between___ and____)An other interesting stats besides the displayed winrate would be the average opponents rating.Those two things would help to analyse the matchhistory tremendously.

I was browsing Remark's page, and I noticed that even though he is supposedly american, when I try to filter the USA players, he doesn't appear (not even under a different name, his rating is 935 and no one has 935)

The new all time chart looks super cool!

However, players need to have slightly different colors to differentiate them.

Also, it is not perfect, when looking at the top 5 protoss, trust appears as the last protoss bonjwa. Clearly, something is wrong

I was browsing Remark's page, and I noticed that even though he is supposedly american, when I try to filter the USA players, he doesn't appear (not even under a different name, his rating is 935 and no one has 935)

The new all time chart looks super cool!

However, players need to have slightly different colors to differentiate them.

Also, it is not perfect, when looking at the top 5 protoss, trust appears as the last protoss bonjwa. Clearly, something is wrong

The reason Remark doesnt show up on the America page is that inactive players are removed from the rankings until the play again. He hasn't played a match in a while (about 3 months I believe) so he has been marked as inactive. If you look at FXO NA : http://aligulac.com/teams/6-FXOpen-e-Sports-North-America/ you can see him listed on the inactive roster since it's been so long since he's played a game.

I'd like to thank Aligulac for offering evidence for a suspicion I've had since I started watching MSL with Lost Saga and Avalon:

The dual tournament format is unfair to players and offers advantages and disadvantages based on initial pairings. Here are 3 simulated Flash/Jaedong/Bisu/Stork groups, the first with Flash vs Jaedong first, the second with Flash vs Bisu first, the third with Flash vs Stork first.

The chances to advance differ by 10% OR MORE depending on initial pairings. While this format is more entertaining than round robin to me and many others, it's definitely a completely unfair format and no better than flipping a coin to break ties.

On June 22 2013 13:16 jalstar wrote:I'd like to thank Aligulac for offering evidence for a suspicion I've had since I started watching MSL with Lost Saga and Avalon:

The dual tournament format is unfair to players and offers advantages and disadvantages based on initial pairings. Here are 3 simulated Flash/Jaedong/Bisu/Stork groups, the first with Flash vs Jaedong first, the second with Flash vs Bisu first, the third with Flash vs Stork first.

The chances to advance differ by 10% OR MORE depending on initial pairings. While this format is more entertaining than round robin to me and many others, it's definitely a completely unfair format and no better than flipping a coin to break ties.

You are not serious.We could also say that instead of having 8 groups we should just let every player of 32 play each other to guarantee maximum fairness. Because the group seedings aint no better compared to flipping coins to break ties duh huh.

On June 22 2013 13:16 jalstar wrote:The chances to advance differ by 10% OR MORE depending on initial pairings. While this format is more entertaining than round robin to me and many others, it's definitely a completely unfair format and no better than flipping a coin to break ties.

Yeah, you have a point. I'm also strongly in favour of round robin over this dual tournament format. It's not completely correct to say it's not fair because those initial matchups may depend on seeding from previous rounds, but it's definitely much more variable than round robins, that's without question.

A fairly minor suggestion - on your reports page, when mousing over a data point it'd be nice if the total number of games was shown as well as the month and win %. I guess you could add a standard deviation from this as well.

On June 23 2013 07:26 rift wrote:Records>History: Offline, Online, Both (the overall graph)

This is not likely to happen unless we start computing rating numbers for each of these. I don't see the point behind that really. It's a lot of extra computation and complexity for what I don't imagine will be a very insightful (set of) features.

What about doing some crossover between 'balance report' and 'op/up. You would make two hypothetical players for each matchup, each of them would have skill rating equal to average of his race for that matchup in entered skill range (for example average pvt rating in top 100 protoss vs average tvp rating in top 100 terran). Compute their chances in bo1 and do that for each matchup. The skill range could differ, you could enter 1-100 or try lower levels, let's say 100-300.

I think it's interesting, but I'm not sure if it would tell us something better than monthly winrates, since the ratings changes rather slowly and on top of that you would pick even smaller set of players. Problems are similar to 'op/up' stat, which I find not that useful. So it's just idea.

Stats appears to be on a 10 game/series winning streak against players like JYP, Rain, TY and Trap, yet only has a 1344 rating. Going to the most recent 25 games, he's won 19 of them, and his wins then include Soulkey, sOs and Parting.

Its like the Aligulac rating system is relying on Soulkey, Innovation and Flash to go out across the earth and steal nerds Aligulac points, and then graciously lose a bunch of times in proleague so that the rest of the Kespa players can have some too- ie, get the reasonable ratings they should have.

I wonder if you shouldn't give the Kespa players a bit of the benefit of the doubt and start all Kespa players with a score of 1400. I think its reasonable to suggest that, over time, most Kespa players will prove that they belong above the 1400 line anyways- in this way they can have accurate ratings sooner, their earning of points will upset the code A/code S players scores less, and they won't steal as many points from the point pool in the rest of the world as they climb up to where they're supposed to be at.

This roughly equates them to the Aligulac level of Thorzain, who did play in proleague and generally got stomped with at 20% winrate until he left, or Zenio who has a 30% proleague win rate.

The thing is, over time if the 1400 was too much it'll just go to stronger players elsewhere as the points gradually spread out over time. I don't think 1400 is too much though.

Stats appears to be on a 10 game/series winning streak against players like JYP, Rain, TY and Trap, yet only has a 1344 rating. Going to the most recent 25 games, he's won 19 of them, and his wins then include Soulkey, sOs and Parting.

Its like the Aligulac rating system is relying on Soulkey, Innovation and Flash to go out across the earth and steal nerds Aligulac points, and then graciously lose a bunch of times in proleague so that the rest of the Kespa players can have some too- ie, get the reasonable ratings they should have.

I wonder if you shouldn't give the Kespa players a bit of the benefit of the doubt and start all Kespa players with a score of 1400. I think its reasonable to suggest that, over time, most Kespa players will prove that they belong above the 1400 line anyways- in this way they can have accurate ratings sooner, their earning of points will upset the code A/code S players scores less, and they won't steal as many points from the point pool in the rest of the world as they climb up to where they're supposed to be at.

This roughly equates them to the Aligulac level of Thorzain, who did play in proleague and generally got stomped with at 20% winrate until he left, or Zenio who has a 30% proleague win rate.

The thing is, over time if the 1400 was too much it'll just go to stronger players elsewhere as the points gradually spread out over time. I don't think 1400 is too much though.

Korean already get a headstart of 1200. You may believe that KeSPA players are godlike and deserve better rankings but there is nothing we can do if they only play a few games per month. The more games played, the better. Also they get offline bonuses other players don't always get.

That being said, you can try to give them a bigger headstart and recalculate everything. The ressources are out there.

Stats has my back He even took down TY, who Flash named as one of the top 3 terrans in the entire world on LO3 a day or two ago.

Again, I think players like him are currently extremely underrated in Aligulac because of the isolation of the Kespa progamers relative to the rest of the world. I think a larger adjustment would help to correct it, with no adverse effects in the long run <3

I can say one last thing though: the 1400 initial number for Kespa progamers could be used for the next year, then a new version revert all koreans to start with the same 1000 as everyone else. Thus, it would be a temporary fix while the ratings wait for the number of games to stack up enough to be accurate.

The problem is that if they are completely isolated, then how can you say higher ratings are justified?

For example, if Stats (or any other KeSPA pro-gamer) is truly underrated, then he will easily breeze through Code A qualifiers and steal points from eSF players. (He did in fact make it through the Code A qualifiers I believe).

On the other hand, look at Zest. Zest performs finely against other KeSPA players in ProLeague. If Zest is truly underrated, why hasn't he qualified for Code A?

On June 22 2013 13:16 jalstar wrote:I'd like to thank Aligulac for offering evidence for a suspicion I've had since I started watching MSL with Lost Saga and Avalon:

The dual tournament format is unfair to players and offers advantages and disadvantages based on initial pairings. (...)

The chances to advance differ by 10% OR MORE depending on initial pairings. While this format is more entertaining than round robin to me and many others, it's definitely a completely unfair format and no better than flipping a coin to break ties.

There will also be unfairness in the round-robin format based on what order games are played. In the last rounds of play, some players will already have advanced or have been knocked out. These players will most likely not play as well as they otherwise would.

If placement affects how later brackets are arranged, it motivates players to throw games under given circumstances. This is something we saw a lot in WCG during Brood War times. Nothing is worse than watching a game where you know both players are better off losing while still pretending they are playing at their standard level.

My post might have got lost (the last one on the last page).What do you guys thing about that? I think to have "cleaned" winrates and average opponents rating would be really cool for analysing.

On June 19 2013 08:30 StarGalaxy wrote:It would be really cool if you could filter the match history depending on the opponents rating.like the date option which is really awesome btw: (opponents rating between___ and____)An other interesting stats besides the displayed winrate would be the average opponents rating.Those two things would help to analyse the matchhistory tremendously.

On July 01 2013 00:52 StarGalaxy wrote:My post might have got lost (the last one on the last page).What do you guys thing about that? I think to have "cleaned" winrates and average opponents rating would be really cool for analysing.

On June 19 2013 08:30 StarGalaxy wrote:It would be really cool if you could filter the match history depending on the opponents rating.like the date option which is really awesome btw: (opponents rating between___ and____)An other interesting stats besides the displayed winrate would be the average opponents rating.Those two things would help to analyse the matchhistory tremendously.

Noted . I agree it would be cool, but I'd have to introduce some extra DB fields to do this in a clean and efficient manner, so it's not something I can just slap in there and get working in half an hour.

Hey. First congratz to you guys you're doing not only a pretty neat job but whats nice is that you listen to feedback too and it is really nice.

All right, I apologize in advance because I have a non-aligulac related question. But since you guys are into statistics and coding I propose a little problem to solve in case you have some free time during summer :D

Given the already announced non WCS events that gives point, the current WCS rankings, and the upcoming WCS seasons,, considering only the best 144 players to compete (or whatever model suits you), what is the minimal amount of points required to be in the top 16 players in 96 percent of the possible configurations ?

On July 11 2013 05:06 Milkis wrote:Am I missing something, or does Aligulac does not contain map data?

Correct. It probably never will, for various reasons (incomplete data, not worth the incredible time/effort at this point, contributes nothing to the overall ranking directly, etc), I figure.

Even if it's incomplete, it's probably worth putting in the data, as it will be the next step in predicting results. That, and we can see how maps affect balance. It's difficult, but probably will be required at one point or another.

On July 11 2013 05:06 Milkis wrote:Am I missing something, or does Aligulac does not contain map data?

Correct. It probably never will, for various reasons (incomplete data, not worth the incredible time/effort at this point, contributes nothing to the overall ranking directly, etc), I figure.

Even if it's incomplete, it's probably worth putting in the data, as it will be the next step in predicting results. That, and we can see how maps affect balance. It's difficult, but probably will be required at one point or another.

It would be a great to have, absolutely. But it would also require updating 150.000 matches, which is a ton of work. We have awesome volunteers, but we don't have that many awesome volunteers. Yet.

On July 11 2013 05:06 Milkis wrote:Am I missing something, or does Aligulac does not contain map data?

Correct. It probably never will, for various reasons (incomplete data, not worth the incredible time/effort at this point, contributes nothing to the overall ranking directly, etc), I figure.

Even if it's incomplete, it's probably worth putting in the data, as it will be the next step in predicting results. That, and we can see how maps affect balance. It's difficult, but probably will be required at one point or another.

I've spoken on this matter before, to the best of my understanding (based upon internal discussions with BB and everyone else) and the conclusion we've come to is that:

1) there simply aren't enough games played per map per player that this would increase the accuracy of predictions and/or player skill ratings, on the contrary a much smaller and more fragmented sample size would lead to more uncertainty etc.

2) it's really REALLY hard (and in many cases impossible) to find map information for many of the online tournaments/qualifiers and small LANs that we add to the database

I'm not sure what to say to your claim that "it will be required at one point or another", but if we're going to see the scene go for a Proleague approach to maps, with more frequent map pool changes, then implementing such a thing would be even less accurate or meaningful (refer to #1 above).

Not to mention that we would need a proper definition of the term "map", as silly as it sounds. Would different versions of a map count towards the same map, or be separate? What about different spawn positions, missing watch towers, etc.? The more accurate we'd be, the less useful the data would be for any kind of prediction or statistics.

On July 11 2013 05:06 Milkis wrote:Am I missing something, or does Aligulac does not contain map data?

Correct. It probably never will, for various reasons (incomplete data, not worth the incredible time/effort at this point, contributes nothing to the overall ranking directly, etc), I figure.

Even if it's incomplete, it's probably worth putting in the data, as it will be the next step in predicting results. That, and we can see how maps affect balance. It's difficult, but probably will be required at one point or another.

It would be a great to have, absolutely. But it would also require updating 150.000 matches, which is a ton of work. We have awesome volunteers, but we don't have that many awesome volunteers. Yet.

Technically you can just rip a lot of them off TLPD, which does have map data, which should aid with the process. Maybe even request a rip of it so you don't have to farm it.

1) there simply aren't enough games played per map per player that this would increase the accuracy of predictions and/or player skill ratings, on the contrary a much smaller and more fragmented sample size would lead to more uncertainty etc.

Even if it is something as simple as map balance (ie, races sent out in proleague, race matchups in tournaments), it'd help quite considerably and that statistic should have enough sample points. Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

2) it's really REALLY hard (and in many cases impossible) to find map information for many of the online tournaments/qualifiers and small LANs that we add to the database

That's probably true, but you can just dummy for that and still have some sort of an idea. If we're going to go with the sample size argument, most of the players you add from the small LANs and qualifiers also have a small sample size so it's hard to get a "true rating" of a player, but we believe in LLN so we go through with it anyway.

I'm not sure what to say to your claim that "it will be required at one point or another", but if we're going to see the scene go for a Proleague approach to maps, with more frequent map pool changes, then implementing such a thing would be even less accurate or meaningful (refer to #1 above).

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at, and easier to predict the outcome (a Protoss comes out on battle royale? you bet it's going to get slaughtered. Terran on Central Plains? Nom nom nom)

I mean, it comes down to "we don't have it, and it requires work" and that's fine because getting volunteers and working on something like this is hard, but I don't really agree with the reasoning being put out, and don't see why there shouldn't be at least an option to add maps to it rather than taking it out completely.

On July 11 2013 05:58 Conti wrote:Not to mention that we would need a proper definition of the term "map", as silly as it sounds. Would different versions of a map count towards the same map, or be separate? What about different spawn positions, missing watch towers, etc.? The more accurate we'd be, the less useful the data would be for any kind of prediction or statistics.

Is your argument really "the more accurate our data, the less useful it is for statistics?" Maybe that's the case for Aligulac's rating system but please think about what you just said... If it's useless data, you don't need to use it, but having more data can't really hurt. It would be useful for map makers to refer to also in the future.

Sorry if I sound like i'm attacking it, I'm really not attacking you guys in anyway -- but perhaps I think it'll be more useful and perhaps worth at least allowing people to submit map data.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote:Is your argument really "the more accurate our data, the less useful it is for statistics?" Maybe that's the case for Aligulac's rating system but please think about what you just said...

Please don't be condescending when you didn't even understand my point...

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote:Is your argument really "the more accurate our data, the less useful it is for statistics?" Maybe that's the case for Aligulac's rating system but please think about what you just said...

Please don't be condescending when you didn't even understand my point...

On July 11 2013 06:27 Conti wrote:Don't get me wrong. I'd love to have maps in aligulac. But you can see that it would be a lot of work, both in implementation and in maintenance.

I understand that's what it comes down to, it's just very odd when you guys appeal to statistics to say "it's useless" when it's not, when the issue comes from cost. I agree that it is a lot of work on inputting the data, however, but at the same time, I don't see why it shouldn't have at least an option to allow people to add it in.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

Does that make sense?

Yes. Maps do play a huge role in prediction. But with the exception of Antiga, Daybreak and Cloud Kingdom (all of which are obviously no longer relevant), there simply aren't enough games played on singular maps that implementing this would benefit the system in any significant, noticeable way.

In an ideal world, there would be far more tournaments for players to compete in, and for us this would solve most if not all of our problems.

While I won't discuss the statistical/predictional value on the matter of maps or no maps, I can discuss some of the more simple issues:1: Getting the info on maps played can be tough unless you are talking about the big leagues, let's not get into the problems with different versions of a map and some with forced spawns etc. 2: Backtracking the existing DB would take months since we can't do it in bulks like we did with the event NSM.3: Number of capable volunteers = 5-104: The entire entry system/parsing system would need an overhaul.5: As far as I recall, we store the rows of matches as sets, not games, meaning that they would needed to be split with an extra attribute to keep track of which games belongs to which set.

I really wish we could have maps, but if you check aligulac.com/db you see that outside kiekaboe, conti, BB, MoP and shellshock, we really doesn't have nearly enough manpower to consistently keep it all updated, nor do we have the prestige of being affilliated with TL to attract them.

On July 11 2013 06:27 Conti wrote:Don't get me wrong. I'd love to have maps in aligulac. But you can see that it would be a lot of work, both in implementation and in maintenance.

I understand that's what it comes down to, it's just very odd when you guys appeal to statistics to say "it's useless" when it's not, when the issue comes from cost. I agree that it is a lot of work on inputting the data, however, but at the same time, I don't see why it shouldn't have at least an option to allow people to add it in.

Mostly because that requires a lot of programming work to implement. We'd need to change our database structure, as Grovbolle says. We'd need to update the parser to accept map syntax. We'd need to create new interfaces for adding maps. We'd need to figure out how much information on maps we want to have (as I mentioned above, map version, spawns, etc.). We'd need to make sure that we don't break anything that's already working. And I'm sure that we'll find tons of other stuff that needs to be done first as soon as we start working on all that.

Oh, yeah. And reworking our database structure of course means that we would need to change practically everything else so it would still work with the new database structure.

On July 11 2013 06:42 Grovbolle wrote:Ps: map stats probably would be useful, although it wouldn't be compared to the massive workload behind implementing it and maintaining it.

That's the thing.

Yeah, it's an improvement, but it's like having an upgrade on the Fusion Core for 1000 minerals / 1000 gas / 300 seconds that gives Marauders an added 0.5 damage. If you catch my drift with this terrible analogy. :/

I believe that map stats would make aligulac strictly better. In fact, no one can argue the contrary.

However, by how much? Well, I guess "not very much". As mentioned, small sample sizes make the variance jump. Also, the community has the good taste to eliminate any map with a W/L ratio bigger than 60/40. So maps already have only a very small variance.

The cost of updating the DB is on the other hand monstrously large.

I believe that there are better ways to improve aligulac than implementing map stats. Perhaps not better predictive power, but just a better website, for far much less work.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

Does that make sense?

Yes. Maps do play a huge role in prediction. But with the exception of Antiga, Daybreak and Cloud Kingdom (all of which are obviously no longer relevant), there simply aren't enough games played on singular maps that implementing this would benefit the system in any significant, noticeable way.

In an ideal world, there would be far more tournaments for players to compete in, and for us this would solve most if not all of our problems.

Most big maps have ~150 games of each match up played in it. Should be "enough".

On July 11 2013 06:42 Grovbolle wrote:Ps: map stats probably would be useful, although it wouldn't be compared to the massive workload behind implementing it and maintaining it.

That's what it would come down to, yeah. It's unfortunate I suppose, but what I'm trying to point out is that it's very limiting in the future not being able to add in maps. The problems you point out is only going to get worse, but at that point you've already completely ruled out the possibility of adding something important in.

Sorry, I think i went a bit overboard because I don't agree with the statistical reasoning being thrown out. Sorry about wasting your time D:

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

Does that make sense?

Yes. Maps do play a huge role in prediction. But with the exception of Antiga, Daybreak and Cloud Kingdom (all of which are obviously no longer relevant), there simply aren't enough games played on singular maps that implementing this would benefit the system in any significant, noticeable way.

In an ideal world, there would be far more tournaments for players to compete in, and for us this would solve most if not all of our problems.

Most big maps have ~150 games of each match up played in it. Should be "enough".

On July 11 2013 06:42 Grovbolle wrote:Ps: map stats probably would be useful, although it wouldn't be compared to the massive workload behind implementing it and maintaining it.

That's what it would come down to, yeah. It's unfortunate I suppose, but what I'm trying to point out is that it's very limiting in the future not being able to add in maps. The problems you point out is only going to get worse, but at that point you've already completely ruled out the possibility of adding something important in.

Sorry, I think i went a bit overboard because I don't agree with the statistical reasoning being thrown out. Sorry about wasting your time D:

Well formulated feedback and discussion is never a waste of time. :-) It havde been discussed to death internally though, which makes it a bit funny when people point it out, since we are already horribly aware of our lack of this feature. Ultimately, the speed and ease of which we can add matches was/is our main afvantage over TLPD

On July 11 2013 06:54 Milkis wrote:That's what it would come down to, yeah. It's unfortunate I suppose, but what I'm trying to point out is that it's very limiting in the future not being able to add in maps. The problems you point out is only going to get worse, but at that point you've already completely ruled out the possibility of adding something important in.

On the DB side, it'll take only a few minutes to write all the models needed to implement maps. You are right that if we don't do it now, it will only gets worse but we hadn't had a new regular uploader in the last three months whereas we commits from 2 new dev. Unless there is a massive decision on their side to have this feature, I don't think we will integrate that in the near future.

I'll jump in to the map discussion and say adding maps kinda sucks. Most tournaments don't track their own maps played. Dreamhack don't track any maps and they don't even track walkovers.ESL have brackets that display replays but 90% don't get uploaded.MLG made all their maps not show up in match historiesThere are also tournaments that like to make their own versions of maps just to be different.On top of tournaments sucking, more and more players hide their match histories.

Having said all that, I think map data is a good thing to try and have.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

Does that make sense?

Yes. Maps do play a huge role in prediction. But with the exception of Antiga, Daybreak and Cloud Kingdom (all of which are obviously no longer relevant), there simply aren't enough games played on singular maps that implementing this would benefit the system in any significant, noticeable way.

In an ideal world, there would be far more tournaments for players to compete in, and for us this would solve most if not all of our problems.

Most big maps have ~150 games of each match up played in it. Should be "enough". :

Just a quick note, with 150 samples (for a real hidden percentage value close to 50%) you get a confidence interval of roughly +/- 9% at 95% confidence level.

In other words, if Bel'Shir Vestige has 150 pro games of PvZ played on it, and exactly 75 are wins and 75 are false, the only thing I can say is that "With 95% confidence, the win ratio is between 41% and 59%". ("And in 5% of the cases, I am so wrong that in fact, the percentage is lower than 41% or higher than 59%. Lol.") Seeing how we scream bloody murder if the win ratio is at 55/45 I don't see this being really useful.

Basically, I believe we would require at least 1000 samples of a single matchup on a single map, which shows empirical win ratio of 58% at least to have any significant conclusion.

Edit : OK, I reread that and perhaps what I wrote may be perceived as rude. Every discussion is valuable. I do data mining and machine learning, and I simply love to have more data. The more I have, the more magic I can do. But I also need to moderate my excitement, because a lot of information is in fact irrelevant (fun fact : one big big big part of data mining is getting rid of data. I just love how in DNA analysis, getting rid of 99.9% of the information is not unheard of. In I-don't-remember-what-study, the final predictor for a cancer used only 19 genes out of 40.000).

Is there a way how to filter player's stats in only one tournament/league?So for example, I would like to see Fantasy's stats only in SPL in both WoL and HotS for every matchup.And then I would like to check say JangBi's stats in SPL, only HotS, PvT only.Is there a way how to do that?

(If not, than take this as "this is what would be nice to get next" kinda feedback ^^)

On July 11 2013 23:12 Ammanas wrote:Is there a way how to filter player's stats in only one tournament/league?So for example, I would like to see Fantasy's stats only in SPL in both WoL and HotS for every matchup.And then I would like to check say JangBi's stats in SPL, only HotS, PvT only.Is there a way how to do that?

(If not, than take this as "this is what would be nice to get next" kinda feedback ^^)

That's not quite ideal, though, as the search will include everything you're searching for (who'd have thought), so if there'd be another event with "proleague" in the name, it would include that, too. Still, that's the best we have for now.

On July 11 2013 23:12 Ammanas wrote:Is there a way how to filter player's stats in only one tournament/league?So for example, I would like to see Fantasy's stats only in SPL in both WoL and HotS for every matchup.And then I would like to check say JangBi's stats in SPL, only HotS, PvT only.Is there a way how to do that?

(If not, than take this as "this is what would be nice to get next" kinda feedback ^^)

That's not quite ideal, though, as the search will include everything you're searching for (who'd have thought), so if there'd be another event with "proleague" in the name, it would include that, too. Still, that's the best we have for now.

On July 11 2013 06:11 Milkis wrote: Being afraid of "uncertainty" is a silly thing when you're working with statistics, because I'm sure you'll gain more in accuracy from a cost from variance.

[...]

On the contrary Proleague format is the most map dependent one because of how they select players to go in a match. There's more to analyze and look at.

I don't think you understand what I was getting at. The moment that player ratings and the prediction system become dependent on maps as well, both will become significantly less accurate simply because there are less games to work with. Therein lies the issue with the uncertainty.

If what you're asking for is simple stuff like map winrate statistics and whatnot, that would be much simpler to do, but at the same time redundant because TLPD already does it and it would be very hard for us to add a significant amount to that (again, lack of information for many tournaments that aren't on TLPD).

Let's put it this way. I'm not asking to add a dummy for each map, but having the map in the database would be useful so you can easily calculate win rates to feed the racial win rates on each map for your rating system. I'm just saying maps play a huge role in prediction (even if that effect is averaged out in simple racial win rates) and I'm surprised it isn't being considered atm.

Does that make sense?

Yes. Maps do play a huge role in prediction. But with the exception of Antiga, Daybreak and Cloud Kingdom (all of which are obviously no longer relevant), there simply aren't enough games played on singular maps that implementing this would benefit the system in any significant, noticeable way.

In an ideal world, there would be far more tournaments for players to compete in, and for us this would solve most if not all of our problems.

Most big maps have ~150 games of each match up played in it. Should be "enough". :

Just a quick note, with 150 samples (for a real hidden percentage value close to 50%) you get a confidence interval of roughly +/- 9% at 95% confidence level.

In other words, if Bel'Shir Vestige has 150 pro games of PvZ played on it, and exactly 75 are wins and 75 are false, the only thing I can say is that "With 95% confidence, the win ratio is between 41% and 59%". ("And in 5% of the cases, I am so wrong that in fact, the percentage is lower than 41% or higher than 59%. Lol.") Seeing how we scream bloody murder if the win ratio is at 55/45 I don't see this being really useful.

Basically, I believe we would require at least 1000 samples of a single matchup on a single map, which shows empirical win ratio of 58% at least to have any significant conclusion.

Edit : OK, I reread that and perhaps what I wrote may be perceived as rude. Every discussion is valuable. I do data mining and machine learning, and I simply love to have more data. The more I have, the more magic I can do. But I also need to moderate my excitement, because a lot of information is in fact irrelevant (fun fact : one big big big part of data mining is getting rid of data. I just love how in DNA analysis, getting rid of 99.9% of the information is not unheard of. In I-don't-remember-what-study, the final predictor for a cancer used only 19 genes out of 40.000).

In a straight forward t.test, you're right -- because you're interested in an estimation of the the property of the map itself. If map is some of the many covariates you're using to estimate something else (such as probability of victory, or player skill), the standard errors shouldn't be too bad. But you're also right in that, you need a certain amount of "imbalance" in the map before you get a noticeable difference in prediction.

As far as the map discussion is concerned, I'm of the same opinion that has been expressed. It'd be cool to have, but it seems to be a pretty high effort to usefulness ratio. Let TLPD have their one advantage (they need it! lawl).

On July 11 2013 23:12 Ammanas wrote:Is there a way how to filter player's stats in only one tournament/league?So for example, I would like to see Fantasy's stats only in SPL in both WoL and HotS for every matchup.And then I would like to check say JangBi's stats in SPL, only HotS, PvT only.Is there a way how to do that?

(If not, than take this as "this is what would be nice to get next" kinda feedback ^^)

That's not quite ideal, though, as the search will include everything you're searching for (who'd have thought), so if there'd be another event with "proleague" in the name, it would include that, too. Still, that's the best we have for now.

Since a month or so ago you can also use quotation marks, so for example "Group E" will just find anything called Group E instead of everything with E in the name.

When I choose "Best Zergs (All)" Stephano is in there (No5), but when I choose"Best Zergs" (Non-Koreans), Sen is better (higher ranked) than Stephano, yet he is not in the best Zerg (All) list, athough Stephano is.

Something's not right there.

"Blizzard is never gonna nerf Terran because of those American and European fuck" - Korean Netizen

On July 12 2013 01:33 Leviance wrote:When I choose "Best Zergs (All)" Stephano is in there (No5), but when I choose"Best Zergs" (Non-Koreans), Sen is better (higher ranked) than Stephano, yet he is not in the best Zerg (All) list, athough Stephano is.

Something's not right there.

I'm confused, are you talking about Rankings here or Records (aka History)?

On July 12 2013 01:33 Leviance wrote:When I choose "Best Zergs (All)" Stephano is in there (No5), but when I choose"Best Zergs" (Non-Koreans), Sen is better (higher ranked) than Stephano, yet he is not in the best Zerg (All) list, athough Stephano is.

Has there ever been a suggestion to have the option to add in ace matches for proleague style league predictions? For example, in today's STX vs SKT match, have the option to enter in Rain and Innovation as the aces. Then the output would be something like:33% STX wins in first 6 sets33% SKT wins in first 6 sets33% Goes to ace match

On July 12 2013 03:31 monk wrote:Has there ever been a suggestion to have the option to add in ace matches for proleague style league predictions? For example, in today's STX vs SKT match, have the option to enter in Rain and Innovation as the aces. Then the output would be something like:33% STX wins in first 6 sets33% SKT wins in first 6 sets33% Goes to ace match

On July 12 2013 01:33 Leviance wrote:When I choose "Best Zergs (All)" Stephano is in there (No5), but when I choose"Best Zergs" (Non-Koreans), Sen is better (higher ranked) than Stephano, yet he is not in the best Zerg (All) list, athough Stephano is.

On July 12 2013 01:33 Leviance wrote:When I choose "Best Zergs (All)" Stephano is in there (No5), but when I choose"Best Zergs" (Non-Koreans), Sen is better (higher ranked) than Stephano, yet he is not in the best Zerg (All) list, athough Stephano is.

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

To what purpose?Aligulac would always choose Player A 2-1 in the above scenario.

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

To what purpose?Aligulac would always choose Player A 2-1 in the above scenario.

No, I mean if there is a 40% chance that Player A 2-1, then there is only a 40% chance that Aligulac chooses that result.

The purpose would be to predict an entire tournament. The thing is, at the moment, the player with the best bracket luck or the player with the highest vT/vZ/vP ratings will have the highest percentage to win the tournament. However, in real life, even if someone has a 60% chance to win against everyone else, that doesn't necessarily mean he will win the tournament.

It's sort of like simulating an entire tournament - that way, Aligulac does not simply choose the most favored player to win the tournament. Instead, it incorporates luck and allows for upsets to happen, making it more like a real tournament.

Sure, it's probably not the most useful feature, but it would definitely be cool.

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

To what purpose?Aligulac would always choose Player A 2-1 in the above scenario.

No, I mean if there is a 40% chance that Player A 2-1, then there is only a 40% chance that Aligulac chooses that result.

The purpose would be to predict an entire tournament. The thing is, at the moment, the player with the best bracket luck or the player with the highest vT/vZ/vP ratings will have the highest percentage to win the tournament. However, in real life, even if someone has a 60% chance to win against everyone else, that doesn't necessarily mean he will win the tournament.

It's sort of like simulating an entire tournament - that way, Aligulac does not simply choose the most favored player to win the tournament. Instead, it incorporates luck and allows for upsets to happen, making it more like a real tournament.

Sure, it's probably not the most useful feature, but it would definitely be cool.

That is not actually how the predict function works. It also takes into consideration "what-if" scenarios.

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

To what purpose?Aligulac would always choose Player A 2-1 in the above scenario.

No, I mean if there is a 40% chance that Player A 2-1, then there is only a 40% chance that Aligulac chooses that result.

The purpose would be to predict an entire tournament. The thing is, at the moment, the player with the best bracket luck or the player with the highest vT/vZ/vP ratings will have the highest percentage to win the tournament. However, in real life, even if someone has a 60% chance to win against everyone else, that doesn't necessarily mean he will win the tournament.

It's sort of like simulating an entire tournament - that way, Aligulac does not simply choose the most favored player to win the tournament. Instead, it incorporates luck and allows for upsets to happen, making it more like a real tournament.

Sure, it's probably not the most useful feature, but it would definitely be cool.

That is not actually how the predict function works. It also takes into consideration "what-if" scenarios.

Hmm... I think the issue is that I'm not clarifying enough. Let's take a quick example - a 4-man tournament.

INnoVation vs. Shine, Mvp vs. Symbol

Currently, this is basically what Aligulac does:

INnoVation has a 95% chance against ShineMvp has a 60% chance against Symbol

INnoVation has a 60% chance of taking the tournamentMvp has a 20% chance of taking the tournamentSymbol has a 18% chance of taking the tournamentShine has a 2% chance of taking the tournament

This is my suggestion:

Implement a simulation option which simulates the entire tournament. So when we get to INnoVation vs. Shine, INnoVation has a 95% chance to win. Well, use a random number generator between 1-100. If the number is 95 or less, then Aligulac chooses INnoVation. Same thing with Mvp vs. Symbol, except anything under 60 goes to Mvp (because Mvp has a 60% chance to win). The consequence is that every simulation will be different - some simulations will have INnoVation winning, other simulations will have Mvp winning. You would be able to use the Retry button to rerun the simulation.

Hopefully that makes sense? I just think it would be a cool feature, not essential or useful, but awesome nonetheless.

On July 18 2013 17:21 graNite wrote:How do you measure the deadliness of a group? By the chance difference between every player?

I guess there is a lot of different answers to that, but in my opinion the group of death is the group where it is most likely that a top player (a player expected to go to Ro2/Ro4) will get eliminated.

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

To what purpose?Aligulac would always choose Player A 2-1 in the above scenario.

No, I mean if there is a 40% chance that Player A 2-1, then there is only a 40% chance that Aligulac chooses that result.

The purpose would be to predict an entire tournament. The thing is, at the moment, the player with the best bracket luck or the player with the highest vT/vZ/vP ratings will have the highest percentage to win the tournament. However, in real life, even if someone has a 60% chance to win against everyone else, that doesn't necessarily mean he will win the tournament.

It's sort of like simulating an entire tournament - that way, Aligulac does not simply choose the most favored player to win the tournament. Instead, it incorporates luck and allows for upsets to happen, making it more like a real tournament.

Sure, it's probably not the most useful feature, but it would definitely be cool.

That is not actually how the predict function works. It also takes into consideration "what-if" scenarios.

Hmm... I think the issue is that I'm not clarifying enough. Let's take a quick example - a 4-man tournament.

INnoVation vs. Shine, Mvp vs. Symbol

Currently, this is basically what Aligulac does:

INnoVation has a 95% chance against ShineMvp has a 60% chance against Symbol

INnoVation has a 60% chance of taking the tournamentMvp has a 20% chance of taking the tournamentSymbol has a 18% chance of taking the tournamentShine has a 2% chance of taking the tournament

This is my suggestion:

Implement a simulation option which simulates the entire tournament. So when we get to INnoVation vs. Shine, INnoVation has a 95% chance to win. Well, use a random number generator between 1-100. If the number is 95 or less, then Aligulac chooses INnoVation. Same thing with Mvp vs. Symbol, except anything under 60 goes to Mvp (because Mvp has a 60% chance to win). The consequence is that every simulation will be different - some simulations will have INnoVation winning, other simulations will have Mvp winning. You would be able to use the Retry button to rerun the simulation.

Hopefully that makes sense? I just think it would be a cool feature, not essential or useful, but awesome nonetheless.

I get what you are saying, it's basically a simple simulation, I am sure it is doable, however not currently a priority.

On July 18 2013 17:19 Da_Baeverforce wrote:Can you make a Group of Death Calculation?

But there can be only one group of death, and I need to know which one it is. Can you guys help me?

We have discussed a lot what defines a group of death, since we still doesn't have a clear definition (highest average rating of players, highest discrepancy between top and bottom, best 3/4 players etc.), we haven't yet defined a GoD metric.

On July 18 2013 17:27 graNite wrote:Is there a way to see the race distribution over the top 100 pro players?

EU High Masters Protoss ~ Grubby: "I'd rather play a strategy that is worse, but that I feel confident in, than play the better strategy, not really feeling it and not being 100% behind it" ~ Sad Zealot Fan </3

On July 17 2013 09:59 Entirety wrote:Can you make a feature where Aligulac actually picks a result?

Say, for example, that there is a match. Player A vs. Player B

Player A 2-0 30%Player A 2-1 40%Player B 2-1 20%Player B 2-0 10%

Then Aligulac actually picks one of those results, so that there is a 30% chance that it chooses Player A 2-0, 40% chance that it chooses Player A 2-1, etc. Then, if you try again, then Aligulac might pick a different result.

I wrote a script for this using Python and BeautifulSoup, it needs a bit of cleaning up but it wasn't very difficult to get the results. Will probably post it in the next few days.

First of all, thank you for all the hard work you've done on this amazing website. It's the best predication tool I've seen.

I was browsing through the website when I noticed some of the adjustments didn't seem to make sense. I noticed this explanation in the FAQ:

"The upshot of this is that if a player overperforms versus Terran (say 2–0 when 1–1 was expected), but significantly underperforms in the other matchups (say 0–10 in each when 5–5 was expected), the rating versus Terran may still decrease."

Will this still happen for low uncertainty?

If we have a hypothetical player with 100% winrate versus Terran but has 0% winrate in the other two (and perhaps is matched up against Terran less) will their vT rating just continually decrease?

Edit: Will there a periodic report on the website on accuracy of predictions?

First off great website with great simple design and stacked full of stats :DI have a suggestion for another column ranking in the teams section. The Proleague and All-kill scores are a good historical reference but I am always wanting to know who the best teams are right now.So I suggest a third column where the teams can be ranked by the average rating points of their top 5 players (5 players with currently highest rating points). I see there is already room for another column, could be called 'Top 5 Players' or something.

"Certain forms of popular music nowadays, namely rap and hip hop styles, are just irritating gangsters bragging about their illegal exploits and short-sighted lifestyles." - Shiverfish ~2009

On August 26 2013 14:21 ThunderGod wrote:First off great website with great simple design and stacked full of stats :DI have a suggestion for another column ranking in the teams section. The Proleague and All-kill scores are a good historical reference but I am always wanting to know who the best teams are right now.So I suggest a third column where the teams can be ranked by the average rating points of their top 5 players (5 players with currently highest rating points). I see there is already room for another column, could be called 'Top 5 Players' or something.

Scores are not historical measurement but projection (albeit very bad ones) of a team ability to win in these formats.

About the match entries,since sometimes the aligulac staff forget some (well its normal they're human after all) i sometime enter some.I would like to know if there is an easier way to make the ro32/16/8/4/2 thing.

Now to enter the Ro16 results i have to send a whole new request again ?I mean its ok but it takes more time,my suggestion would be adding some kind of system that allows us to type multiple rounds at once.

Feel free to type in all the rounds in a single request, so long as you write in the notes explicitly which matches belong to which rounds. (First 16, then next 8, then next 4, etc.) That's the best I can do with the current system, I'm afraid.

On September 07 2013 04:15 WigglingSquid wrote:KeSPA released their ten-year log of player records.If we were prone to wasting a good amount of time, it would be fun to walk these logs to recreate a timeline for players' skills in Broodwar.

On August 26 2013 14:21 ThunderGod wrote:First off great website with great simple design and stacked full of stats :DI have a suggestion for another column ranking in the teams section. The Proleague and All-kill scores are a good historical reference but I am always wanting to know who the best teams are right now.So I suggest a third column where the teams can be ranked by the average rating points of their top 5 players (5 players with currently highest rating points). I see there is already room for another column, could be called 'Top 5 Players' or something.

Scores are not historical measurement but projection (albeit very bad ones) of a team ability to win in these formats.

Thanks, to clarify I meant average rating of top 5 players, not the whole team.I would like to see this for countries too so we can see the relative strength of different countries with a number attached to it. We could see the depth of a country and it's likelihood to win a match against any other country, same as for team battles. For example average rating of top 5 players inKorea: 1926Canada: 1460Sweden: 1452Ukraine: 1388USA: 1321

These kind of stats are interesting to me

"Certain forms of popular music nowadays, namely rap and hip hop styles, are just irritating gangsters bragging about their illegal exploits and short-sighted lifestyles." - Shiverfish ~2009

On September 07 2013 04:15 WigglingSquid wrote:KeSPA released their ten-year log of player records.If we were prone to wasting a good amount of time, it would be fun to walk these logs to recreate a timeline for players' skills in Broodwar.

I believe it were only proleague matches released.

"Certain forms of popular music nowadays, namely rap and hip hop styles, are just irritating gangsters bragging about their illegal exploits and short-sighted lifestyles." - Shiverfish ~2009

Hey,Does the prediction tool use the "preview" ratings (i.e does it take into account games that were played a day or two before the match by each of the players), or does it use the previous list's rating?

On September 15 2013 21:20 CtrlAltDefeat wrote:Hey,Does the prediction tool use the "preview" ratings (i.e does it take into account games that were played a day or two before the match by each of the players), or does it use the previous list's rating?

Pretty almost sure that it uses the preview matches.Edit: It uses the preview rating. Currently that means all matches except DH Ro16 (excluding Stardust-Elfi). The preview is updated every 6 hours. Currently that means it will be updated in 2½ hours.

Player, event and rating list pages now have some more info shown on top in a tabbed box.

Player rating charts now show the number of games played per period.

Predictions (now under the inference menu) for single matches (shows more data) and proleague matches (you can now simulate ace matches as they should be) have been improved.

The team transfer page looks better than ever before.

You can now navigate directly to any submenu item by hovering over the relevant entry. (This is a bit tricky though… they're a bit small.)

The team list now shows the average rating of the top five players, as well as the number of players.

Many small things…

Mostly, the exciting improvements are under the hood:

Now using Python 3.3, Django 1.6 and PostgreSQL.

The event hierarchy table has been very much improved and should now be much more stable and fast. However, this has introduced a bit of difficulty with regards to sorting. For this reason you might notice that matches are sorted in a funny order sometimes. I will fix this, don't worry.

Tons of bugfixes.

I have decided to remove the compare feature, since it was pretty dull and mostly superseded by the match prediction page. I can add the p-value there instead, if anyone's interested.

In the beginning, there will likely be some problems and bugs owing to the rewrite. Please feel free to report issues here.

For those of you who want SSL support, yeah I've been looking at it and I think I can manage.

The tabs at the top of player ages (e.g. http://aligulac.com/players/48-INnoVation/) have the tab switching function (onclick="switch_tab...") tied to an anchor tag, making them fairly difficult to click. Putting the function on the encompassing td tag would make switching easier and from looking at the function itself, wouldn't require any JS changes.

On September 27 2013 02:27 shid0x wrote:When you're checking a player profile what use does the column ''form'' has ?I assume it shows the stats according to the latest results of the player but how far does it go ? 2 weeks ? 1 month ?

Two months. I think that's a bit on the long end, I might change it.

On September 27 2013 02:39 Grayson Carlyle wrote:The tabs at the top of player ages (e.g. http://aligulac.com/players/48-INnoVation/) have the tab switching function (onclick="switch_tab...") tied to an anchor tag, making them fairly difficult to click. Putting the function on the encompassing td tag would make switching easier and from looking at the function itself, wouldn't require any JS changes.

Good point, I did it like this because I learned earlier that tds can't be links. I assume there won't be a hand-finger cursor on the td to indicate a clickable point?

Other thing I noticed:When mousing over the first row of menu options (Ranking Teams Records Results Reports Inference About Submit) it shows the relevant 2nd level menu options, but if you attempt to click them the menu options revert to the page default. This is confusing behaviour.

would cause the sub-menus not to revert, but then doesn't give you access to the default ones unless you mouse back over this page's menu option. It's a tradeoff, but I think keeping them visible after mousing over them is the more intuitive behaviour.

Something that has bugged me about the ratings, quantization of the values:1) When a player is expected to do, say, 5.2:4.8, but actually achieves 5:5, the rating goes down, but there's no way he could have performed according to the decimal parts2) How much of this accumulates over time? Probably it goes both ways (ie 4.8:3.2 and 5:3) on average but this feels weird

On September 28 2013 17:53 kurosu_ wrote:Something that has bugged me about the ratings, quantization of the values:1) When a player is expected to do, say, 5.2:4.8, but actually achieves 5:5, the rating goes down, but there's no way he could have performed according to the decimal parts2) How much of this accumulates over time? Probably it goes both ways (ie 4.8:3.2 and 5:3) on average but this feels weird

I think it might make more sense to you if you think about comparing different players. If there are two players and one is better (according to the rating system), but both would be predicted at 5:5 due to rounding down/up (5.5:4.5 vs 4.5:5.5), it would practically make the two players even in skill.

You can also look at other "stochastic objects" like dice. A 6-sided die's expected value is 3.5. If you want to "test" a die whether it's actually balanced (=test whether a player is actually rated correctly), you let your statistic model expect a value of 3.5, even though it can't actually happen on an individual roll and adjust the result accordingly with each roll you do (give the player +/- rating).

Considering Korea isn't an actual country it makes sense to keep it under South Korea. I am also fairly certain we are using an imported library of countries which has been modified to include "Non-Koreans", which is why it is called South Korea and not just Korea

First: Big thanks for the site. Very interesting to browse through players and see their performances over time.

I have a question / idea though: It seems to me that most players ratings always rises. This inflation makes surely sense: The more games in the database, the better the system can spread the players apart.

Or am i wrong and the average rating stays always the same?

But would it be possible / difficult to implement a graph or history for each player which accounts for this inflation effect? (Sort of players ratings at the time divide by average rating at the time or whatever mathematically makes most sense). It would be interesting to see, how good a player was relative to his time (for example: who were better, MMA of 2011 or innovation of 2013?).

In the same spirit, I think it also might be interesting to see a players global rank over time

But anyway, thanks for the page. I would hope if tournaments would use this data to display statistics, chances etc. before a match starts.

On October 29 2013 08:09 G-Dy wrote:First: Big thanks for the site. Very interesting to browse through players and see their performances over time.

I have a question / idea though: It seems to me that most players ratings always rises. This inflation makes surely sense: The more games in the database, the better the system can spread the players apart.

Or am i wrong and the average rating stays always the same?

But would it be possible / difficult to implement a graph or history for each player which accounts for this inflation effect? (Sort of players ratings at the time divide by average rating at the time or whatever mathematically makes most sense). It would be interesting to see, how good a player was relative to his time (for example: who were better, MMA of 2011 or innovation of 2013?).

In the same spirit, I think it also might be interesting to see a players global rank over time

But anyway, thanks for the page. I would hope if tournaments would use this data to display statistics, chances etc. before a match starts.

The average changes. Whenever a player enters the database, the sum of all ratings rises (with 1000 or 1200 depending on if he is foreigner or Korean), and when a player retires with a rating above the average, the effective pool decreases and vice versa.

The charts are plotted using data from not only the past, but also the future. The ratings in the lists use only past data (so that they never change). It makes the charts smoother, prettier and nicer to look at. Sparkles and ribbons and such.

The charts are plotted using data from not only the past, but also the future. The ratings in the lists use only past data (so that they never change). It makes the charts smoother, prettier and nicer to look at. Sparkles and ribbons and such.

Cool, that makes sense! It seems to me that it makes the ratings inconsistent with the graphs, though.

I was wondering something : if we take the MC number as a probability distribution, then what does the probability distribution look like?

I am pretty sure that 90% of the players have a MC number of 2 or less, some poor guys stand at 3, and you have at most a couple of progamers at 4. (My guess would be SEA players that have never gone abroad and have never faced moonglade)

Or do you have an incredibly isolated community (African/South American competitors?)

I assume that you guys can use this for multiple purposes, especially in write-ups and during LR-threads

Looks nice When you guys have time left you could also add the ability to filter on an ongoing tournament (e.g., WCS), so they can use this for example when writing the preview of the final and show the performance of both players in that tournament alone. Road to the final basically.

I assume that you guys can use this for multiple purposes, especially in write-ups and during LR-threads

Looks nice When you guys have time left you could also add the ability to filter on an ongoing tournament (e.g., WCS), so they can use this for example when writing the preview of the final and show the performance of both players in that tournament alone. Road to the final basically.

On November 07 2013 16:29 dani` wrote:Looks nice When you guys have time left you could also add the ability to filter on an ongoing tournament (e.g., WCS), so they can use this for example when writing the preview of the final and show the performance of both players in that tournament alone. Road to the final basically.

I assume that you guys can use this for multiple purposes, especially in write-ups and during LR-threads

Looks nice When you guys have time left you could also add the ability to filter on an ongoing tournament (e.g., WCS), so they can use this for example when writing the preview of the final and show the performance of both players in that tournament alone. Road to the final basically.

This is an interesting web site. I will certainly follow it avidely as a good prediction system is worth money.

Having been invovled in offshore wagering outfits for more than 10 years, I know that prediction is always a tricky and difficult thing to do. Those who find a good system end up making a lot of money (millions). They are rare.

The current market prices for the matchups of BlizzCon don't all agree with the predictions of aligulac.

Dear/Taeja, aligulac predicts that Dear will win with a probability of 46.98% (Dear an underdog!!).Bookmakers have set the price of Dear winning to be around 65%.

Bomber/MMA, aligulac predicts that Bomber will win with a probabiliy of 43.73%Bookmakers have set the price of Bomber winning to be around 59%.

Innovation/DuckDoek aligulac and bookmakers are about the same.

Jaedong/MVP, aligulac predicts 65.75%Bookmakers Jaedong wins at 65%

I do wager on these, started recently, and so far so good (against the bookmaker). It's a short run so far, so I could be luckyier than I should have been. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would have won using this prediction system.

Keep in mind that some characteristics of the SC2 scene make it extremely difficult to portray some players' skills both accurately and objectively. If a player almost always plays among a very limited set of players, for example GSL or Proleague, there isn't a very good way to standardize his skill against players outside that pool. Additionally, some players' skill levels are just so close that it's impossible to really predict a match between them.

I think you need to add some labels to the table on the player summary page in the box with All-Time, Form, Highest. A header with something like Matchup, Win Rate, Rating (Rank). As it is it's confusing because I look at the Rating (Rank) column, and it's directly under Highest, so I naturally think those are all time Ratings. Then I spend a long time trying to find the current ratings.

On November 18 2013 13:36 KillerDucky wrote:I think you need to add some labels to the table on the player summary page in the box with All-Time, Form, Highest. A header with something like Matchup, Win Rate, Rating (Rank). As it is it's confusing because I look at the Rating (Rank) column, and it's directly under Highest, so I naturally think those are all time Ratings. Then I spend a long time trying to find the current ratings.

I've never heard of this before. If someone else has this problem can they please tell us as I don't think that a change is necessary.

On November 27 2013 00:39 Greenei wrote:Hey, would it be possible, to have the matches in the database ordered by number or date of entry? It would help me save some time.

It's probably because races are listed in alphabetical order, but if possible,TvZZvPPvTorder like TLPD would be much easier to read than currentPvTPvZTvZ, where races are assymetrically placed. Aligulac has been very helpful, but this has always bugged me.

It would help me if it was ordered by gamenumber (1,2,3,4...) instead of (15646, 8768,...).

OR ordered by the time that the entry was added. So if someone adds a new entry that it is in the first /last row. I need to download the DB pretty often, so it would help me save some time, because I need to always do it 'semi manually'.

It would help me if it was ordered by gamenumber (1,2,3,4...) instead of (15646, 8768,...).

OR ordered by the time that the entry was added. So if someone adds a new entry that it is in the first /last row. I need to download the DB pretty often, so it would help me save some time, because I need to always do it 'semi manually'.

Note that the file is a database dump. It's supposed to be loaded into a PostgreSQL database. However, if you provide more information about what you're trying to do I might be able to help.

Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

I still try to spam it whenever possible.

But the "two world" problem seems to have gotten more prominent recently. And with two worlds I mean the Koreans who regularly compete against foreigners and Koreans who do not.

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

Depends on what you consider "neglected". We get a lot more twitter interactions etc. And the occasional "Hey TaeJa is at the highest Aligulac rating ever" on Reddit. But that's it. I stopped doing the BI-weekly write-ups since they took me a great deal of my limited spare time, and we usually only got 5-10 responses so it seemed futile.

Very few seems to have noticed the new awesome postable you can get from the match results of a player. Like:Results for TaeJa after 2013-06-01.

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

Depends on what you consider "neglected". We get a lot more twitter interactions etc. And the occasional "Hey TaeJa is at the highest Aligulac rating ever" on Reddit. But that's it. I stopped doing the BI-weekly write-ups since they took me a great deal of my limited spare time, and we usually only got 5-10 responses so it seemed futile.

Very few seems to have noticed the new awesome postable you can get from the match results of a player. Like:Results for TaeJa after 2013-06-01.

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

Depends on what you consider "neglected". We get a lot more twitter interactions etc. And the occasional "Hey TaeJa is at the highest Aligulac rating ever" on Reddit. But that's it. I stopped doing the BI-weekly write-ups since they took me a great deal of my limited spare time, and we usually only got 5-10 responses so it seemed futile.

Very few seems to have noticed the new awesome postable you can get from the match results of a player. Like:Results for TaeJa after 2013-06-01.

Well, I mean through the WCS season 1, you'd hardly see a page of the entire 100 page LR thread without an Aligulac prediction. People would predict groups/brackets with updated results etcetera...

Now, even the original posts of LR threads barely contain Aligulac predictions...

I know what you mean. We can't force people to use our predictions, even though we try to provide as smooth an experience as we can, and making posting predictions to TL as easy as possible Ultimately we do this for the community, and we hope that they will use it, but it is the individual posters/LR OP's choice.

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

Depends on what you consider "neglected". We get a lot more twitter interactions etc. And the occasional "Hey TaeJa is at the highest Aligulac rating ever" on Reddit. But that's it. I stopped doing the BI-weekly write-ups since they took me a great deal of my limited spare time, and we usually only got 5-10 responses so it seemed futile.

Very few seems to have noticed the new awesome postable you can get from the match results of a player. Like:Results for TaeJa after 2013-06-01.

Well, I mean through the WCS season 1, you'd hardly see a page of the entire 100 page LR thread without an Aligulac prediction. People would predict groups/brackets with updated results etcetera...

Now, even the original posts of LR threads barely contain Aligulac predictions...

I know what you mean. We can't force people to use our predictions, even though we try to provide as smooth an experience as we can, and making posting predictions to TL as easy as possible Ultimately we do this for the community, and we hope that they will use it, but it is the individual posters/LR OP's choice.

Yeah well, I'm just questioning the demise of that trend in hope one might provide me an answer, however it seems there is no apparent reason as to why it's happening.

On November 30 2013 23:03 Abominous wrote:Who else feels Aligulac has been neglected lately? During WCS S1 I've seen Aligulac being spammed all over LR threads for all kinds of scenarios, WCS using it as an official metric etcetera...Now, we just don't see that kind of stuff anymore...

Why? Did I miss something or?

Depends on what you consider "neglected". We get a lot more twitter interactions etc. And the occasional "Hey TaeJa is at the highest Aligulac rating ever" on Reddit. But that's it. I stopped doing the BI-weekly write-ups since they took me a great deal of my limited spare time, and we usually only got 5-10 responses so it seemed futile.

Very few seems to have noticed the new awesome postable you can get from the match results of a player. Like:Results for TaeJa after 2013-06-01.

Well, I mean through the WCS season 1, you'd hardly see a page of the entire 100 page LR thread without an Aligulac prediction. People would predict groups/brackets with updated results etcetera...

Now, even the original posts of LR threads barely contain Aligulac predictions...

I know what you mean. We can't force people to use our predictions, even though we try to provide as smooth an experience as we can, and making posting predictions to TL as easy as possible Ultimately we do this for the community, and we hope that they will use it, but it is the individual posters/LR OP's choice.

Yeah well, I'm just questioning the demise of that trend in hope one might provide me an answer, however it seems there is no apparent reason as to why it's happening.

Anyways, keep up the good work guys!

I suggested incorporating predictions in LR OPs at the time, but most people dismissed the idea because the post structure is already quite busy.As for the fall in number of appearances, I think that it might be just a matter of two things:- Aligulac losing the novelty effect and being primarily recognized as a more reliable and complete TLPD- the absence of liquidbets/fantasy leagues. I think people are more prone to check out the inference service and talk about its predictions when they are themselves trying to think about outcomes.

I was eager to see the ELO performance of TaeJa and was disappointed. But I was also very impressed the instantaneous overall performance rating of 2440, e.g. to see the best performance (eg given at least some minimal count in matches). Is there a way to retrieve data based on this?

Anyway, I looked at INnoVation's performance. Lots of +∞ that make it impossible to compare. I can't help myself thinking that those ratings comparing to expected performance in rational numbers are bogus.

On December 02 2013 19:14 kurosu_ wrote:I was eager to see the ELO performance of TaeJa and was disappointed. But I was also very impressed the instantaneous overall performance rating of 2440, e.g. to see the best performance (eg given at least some minimal count in matches). Is there a way to retrieve data based on this?

Anyway, I looked at INnoVation's performance. Lots of +∞ that make it impossible to compare. I can't help myself thinking that those ratings comparing to expected performance in rational numbers are bogus.

On December 02 2013 19:14 kurosu_ wrote:I was eager to see the ELO performance of TaeJa and was disappointed. But I was also very impressed the instantaneous overall performance rating of 2440, e.g. to see the best performance (eg given at least some minimal count in matches). Is there a way to retrieve data based on this?

Anyway, I looked at INnoVation's performance. Lots of +∞ that make it impossible to compare. I can't help myself thinking that those ratings comparing to expected performance in rational numbers are bogus.

It's not available from the site but you can download the database dump here (click the link). The performance value are stored in the rating table in columns comp_rat, comp_rat_vp, comp_rat_vt and comp_rat_vz. A value of -1000 indicates undefined. To get the integer values as displayed on the site you have to add the value by 1 and multiply by 1000.

On December 02 2013 19:27 Grovbolle wrote:2 things:1: Elo, not ELO.2: We do not use Elo

Well OK, but can we not focus on what I feel is a red herring ? :-)

I'd be more interested in knowing how to retrieve information related to the Whatever performance as seen in each period/list report.

That should be possible with the API which is coming up (and it really is coming up this time, no joke). There's no built-in function for this because I thought the two-week period is rather arbitrary and it sometimes splits in the middle of tournaments.

On December 02 2013 20:21 GreenMash wrote:Are you going to add the newest patch to the Balance report ?

If it seems significant enough. I don't know, I haven't paid attention.

So I looked up Aligulac on my desktop computer and it said jjakji is currently #16, then I looked it up on my phone and it had jjakji at #10 which got me all excited. I had to physically F5 the site on my desktop to get it to show the updated ratings, any insight on why this is?

On December 09 2013 11:35 slowbacontron wrote:So I looked up Aligulac on my desktop computer and it said jjakji is currently #16, then I looked it up on my phone and it had jjakji at #10 which got me all excited. I had to physically F5 the site on my desktop to get it to show the updated ratings, any insight on why this is?

Is there a way to search how many mirror match-ups are played per month for each race? The number of non-mirror match-ups can be calculated from balance report winrates and sample size, but not mirror ones. It would be really helpful to have a similar graph for mirror MUs. Otherwise, I have to go through all 100 lists to count them all, and that's not ideal as lists are not made monthly... Alternatively, search function like "all ZvZ between Nov.1st and Nov30" would do unless such thing already exists and I'm just dumb.

I'm trying to get these numbers because , frustrated to see nonsense in balance discussion, I am writing an article on current&historical SC2 balance based on Aligulac data among other things. It seems that the number of mirror games is correlated with the balance. (more PvP when P looks OP from other indicators.) So I thought it would be great to include mirror numbers if possible.

There's a bug in the inference BBCode output for dual-tournament groups: the entries in the name column are in inverted order, so that the probabilities for the most likely to advance are in the same row as the name of the least likely to advance.

I'm trying to get these numbers because , frustrated to see nonsense in balance discussion, I am writing an article on current&historical SC2 balance based on Aligulac data among other things. It seems that the number of mirror games is correlated with the balance. (more PvP when P looks OP from other indicators.) So I thought it would be great to include mirror numbers if possible.

Yes, they won't match. The numbers on /periods/ are the number of games, not matches. Sorry for the confusion!

On December 21 2013 22:18 WigglingSquid wrote:There's a bug in the inference BBCode output for dual-tournament groups: the entries in the name column are in inverted order, so that the probabilities for the most likely to advance are in the same row as the name of the least likely to advance.

I'm trying to get these numbers because , frustrated to see nonsense in balance discussion, I am writing an article on current&historical SC2 balance based on Aligulac data among other things. It seems that the number of mirror games is correlated with the balance. (more PvP when P looks OP from other indicators.) So I thought it would be great to include mirror numbers if possible.

Yes, they won't match. The numbers on /periods/ are the number of games, not matches. Sorry for the confusion!

Does it mean that a single best of 3 series counts as 1 match yet 2 or 3 games?So, if I understand it correctly, the numbers on /periods/ and balance reports are both games, and then the numbers on that API "total count" are matches?

So Aligulac considers them to have happened 1 season before Liquipedia does. D: Should this be changed?

Also, it'd be nice to add the rest of the matches from the first tournament, which isn't complete on Aligulac yet, but the preceding image only has half of those matches. I don't know where to get the other half D:

E: I just realized the image doesn't have scores either Maybe they won't be added then.

Interesting. I don't want to delete them too presumptuously since I'm not the one who approved the matches, but if there's no good explanation for including them they'll probably get deleted soon enough.

Some filtering options would be really nice. Specifically, options to filter ratings such that only proleague games are counted, or only foreign vs foreign games, or only Korean vs Korean, but really mostly just interested in ratings in a proleague-only filter

Also, is it possible to get aligulac to auto-update based on ladder results and provide an aligulac rating for ladder players, say, in gm and masters? It's an interesting idea, but I assume it would be either challenging or impossible depending on what data's available.

Can we help spread the word and create pressure to get Rob Pardo to replace Browder as head of Sc2? Pardo led the team for broodwar, frozen throne, and wow/BC. We need to make this a thing before LotV development starts. Think about it.

On January 13 2014 03:13 CutTheEnemy wrote:Some filtering options would be really nice. Specifically, options to filter ratings such that only proleague games are counted, or only foreign vs foreign games, or only Korean vs Korean, but really mostly just interested in ratings in a proleague-only filter

Also, is it possible to get aligulac to auto-update based on ladder results and provide an aligulac rating for ladder players, say, in gm and masters? It's an interesting idea, but I assume it would be either challenging or impossible depending on what data's available.

You want a rating that ONLY counts proleague games? That would not really be that interesting due to the relative small sample size, anything other than simple win%'s would be more or less useless.

With regards to ladderratings, I'm not sure how interesting this would be:

Personally I think the GM ladder shows what you want to see already. Not sure on what types of data can be pulled from battle.net though.

On January 13 2014 03:13 CutTheEnemy wrote:Some filtering options would be really nice. Specifically, options to filter ratings such that only proleague games are counted, or only foreign vs foreign games, or only Korean vs Korean, but really mostly just interested in ratings in a proleague-only filter

Recomputing ratings is a nontrivial problem and takes a fair amount of time. If we want to provide such filters we have to account for all the options and have the numbers ready ahead of time. Right now the ratings are refreshed every six hours and it takes about 20-30 minutes each time (maybe about 10-20 of that is in actual rating updates). In addition to that I feel the idea kind of cheapens the idea of the rating system in the first place. The main rating loses some value if people can cherrypick parameters to make it show what they want it to show.

In short, it's doable with some work, but not on a large scale and frankly I'm not so keen on the idea.

Hey guys, I'm wondering about another thing now. When a player has a "performance" rating for a period, his/her overall performance rating is a straight average of the vP, vT, and vZ ratings but in my opinion it should be a weighted average based on the number of games they played in vP, vT, and vZ each.

For example: see Dear's page http://aligulac.com/players/1659-Dear/period/104/ As of now, 10:36 February 15 (the page will change soon), Dear's overall performance rating is 1881, which is an average of 1869 vP, 1688 vT, and 2086 vZ. However, I think it would be more accurate if his overall performance rating was 1852, which is (1869*5 games vP+1688*12 games vT+2086*8 games vZ)/(5+12+8).

Now that I think about it, the practice of taking a straight average between vP, vT, and vZ ratings to form the overall rating has been a staple of Aligulac for a long time. I've generally thought this to be okay since SC2 is made to have 3 races equally represented, but now I'm wrestling with trying to figure out which way is a better representation of a player's overall skill. I mean, overall rating doesn't affect predictions which is a large part of Aligulac's appeal, but it does affect the ranking lists, which is another large part of Aligulac's appeal. Again, I don't even know if weighing the overall average is better or not, but I think it's worth discussion.

Side note, jjakji's current overall rating would be 2090 either way :D

On February 15 2014 20:09 slowbacontron wrote:Hey guys, I'm wondering about another thing now. When a player has a "performance" rating for a period, his/her overall performance rating is a straight average of the vP, vT, and vZ ratings but in my opinion it should be a weighted average based on the number of games they played in vP, vT, and vZ each.

For example: see Dear's page http://aligulac.com/players/1659-Dear/period/104/ As of now, 10:36 February 15 (the page will change soon), Dear's overall performance rating is 1881, which is an average of 1869 vP, 1688 vT, and 2086 vZ. However, I think it would be more accurate if his overall performance rating was 1852, which is (1869*5 games vP+1688*12 games vT+2086*8 games vZ)/(5+12+8).

Now that I think about it, the practice of taking a straight average between vP, vT, and vZ ratings to form the overall rating has been a staple of Aligulac for a long time. I've generally thought this to be okay since SC2 is made to have 3 races equally represented, but now I'm wrestling with trying to figure out which way is a better representation of a player's overall skill. I mean, overall rating doesn't affect predictions which is a large part of Aligulac's appeal, but it does affect the ranking lists, which is another large part of Aligulac's appeal. Again, I don't even know if weighing the overall average is better or not, but I think it's worth discussion.

Side note, jjakji's current overall rating would be 2090 either way :D

You have a point. Basically only the race-specific ratings matter from a methodical point of view, and taking the average to give the “real” rating rests on the assumption that over a reasonable period of time most people will face a uniform distribution of opponents. For performance ratings, again, the overall one doesn't really matter, but the uniformity assumption can fail.

Great, thanks! I was talking with MoP recently about how even Aligulac earnings is becoming a force to be reckoned with, almost definitely the best earnings database for SC2. These developments are really cool to see!

Thanks for the earnings page fix! That's super great. One tiny thing I'd like, if possible, on that page is a page counter and turner on the bottom like there is in the ratings rankings.

As for this next topic I will mention, I apologize because I know it's been discussed many times and I might have even brought it up myself but forgotten the answer. What is going on in cases like this where Soulkey had a vastly higher performance rating (overall performance, not matchup specific) than his original rating but still ended up losing points? Does it have anything to do with online vs. offline games?

On February 25 2014 16:56 slowbacontron wrote:Thanks for the earnings page fix! That's super great. One tiny thing I'd like, if possible, on that page is a page counter and turner on the bottom like there is in the ratings rankings.

As for this next topic I will mention, I apologize because I know it's been discussed many times and I might have even brought it up myself but forgotten the answer. What is going on in cases like this where Soulkey had a vastly higher performance rating (overall performance, not matchup specific) than his original rating but still ended up losing points? Does it have anything to do with online vs. offline games?

You can't really sum the performance like we do, you have to look at each specific case. Just looking at it, you see his ZvZ was so bad that even though his ZvP and ZvT were positive, he still lost points overall. Personally I think you could remove the Expected score vs. Actual score on the last line, since it leads to misunderstandings like this.

Cool, thanks. Looking at the results and contrasting with the expected scores, as well as the performance rating, I'm led to expect that he would have gained more points from his vT record than lost from his vZ record. So I think there's confusion one could have.

There's a tiny mistake in the Proleague Match predictions. When you scroll down to the TL/Reddit postable predictions, for example in this or this, the probability of the first team winning is pasted in both its own spot and in the spot where the probability of the other team winning should be.

On March 01 2014 14:23 slowbacontron wrote:There's a tiny mistake in the Proleague Match predictions. When you scroll down to the TL/Reddit postable predictions, for example in this or this, the probability of the first team winning is pasted in both its own spot and in the spot where the probability of the other team winning should be.

It would be nice to have a way to graph somebody's global or filtered rank on a graph, like their rating is graphed, as a function of time.

Can we help spread the word and create pressure to get Rob Pardo to replace Browder as head of Sc2? Pardo led the team for broodwar, frozen throne, and wow/BC. We need to make this a thing before LotV development starts. Think about it.

I'm having difficulty placing more than one bye in my predicitons with the new system of adding players to a prediction. the byes just stop being placed in that grey box or refuse to stay where they are

On April 02 2014 18:16 xYc wrote:I'm having difficulty placing more than one bye in my predicitons with the new system of adding players to a prediction. the byes just stop being placed in that grey box or refuse to stay where they are